Hit and Run

I confess. I'm a Tour de France junkie. I know what it's like to ride hard for 100 hilly miles, and I enjoy watching those guys work so hard, while I relax in my recliner with my remote and my iPad. But I take vast exception to the French TV car driver who whacked two riders into a barbed wire fence the other day.

So, maybe I should restrain myself from hit and run blogging. Nah. The Republicans and the Democrats deserve it. They are both attempting to manipulate public opinion against each other instead of raising the debt limit. Raising the US debt limit will not give the legislators permission to spend more money. It only lets the government borrow more money to pay for what they have already committed to spend. Failing to raise the debt limit is like going on a credit card binge, and then refusing to pay up at the end of the month.

The Democrats are trying to do anything to get the Republicans to go back on their pledges not to raise taxes, hoping to split the Republicans into two or more parties. The Republicans are doing anything they can to avoid this. The idea of actually balancing the federal budget is lost in the struggle.

I have news for the Republicans. I think most Americans will support a flatter (but not flat), fairer, simpler tax code that incidentally raises revenues. Starving the beast (of big government) is not as important at this time as making sure that most Americans pay taxes. If we become a nation in which the majority of people pay little or no tax, then they can simply vote to raise taxes on the minority who do pay. We could become a nation of pickpockets, as it were.

And for the Democrats, it's time to end the binging. You can face it now by controlling spending, or precipitate a disastrous decline in Americans' standard of living, from which there won't be any recovery in your political lifetimes. As for raising revenues by taxing lower income people more - you have already voted to take money from them one way or another, and that fact can only be hidden for so long.