The Heart of Our Deficit and Debt Problems is......Us!
There is no doubt that neither party in Washington is fiscally responsible. But how can they be when their voters aren't either? Republicans who don't vote for every tax cut proposed don't last long. Democrats who don't vote for their constituents priorities don't last long either? Anyone who suggests that we should all pay higher taxes and get less services for them is a goner, too.

Everyone can agree that we need to make cuts. But when you look at the details, and the devil is always in the details, people can't come up with things to cut, and that translates very easily to lawmakers not taking action.

Take cutting funds for K-12 education. A whopping 73 percent were opposed to states cutting money for schools.

How about cuts to money going to police, fire departments or other public safety officials? Nope. Seventy-one percent oppose that.

How about cutting healthcare services? Sorry, 65 percent oppose that.

Everyone seems to think that THEY should not have to sacrifice anything and that someone ELSE should pay more and get less. I don't have any expectations of our debt picture getting any better, regardless of which party wins elections. The problem is not the two parties - it is the voters. US...Melman hits it on the head:

• Since Ronald Reagan, Republicans have made electoral hay out of stigmatizing federal spending as going to “welfare queens.” “Waste, fraud and abuse” was their mantra. Gov. Schwarzenegger, now suffering through his own personal budget hell, is perhaps being forced to do penance for the absurd claim, made repeatedly in his winning campaign ads, that the way to get control of California’s budget was simply to audit the state’s books, implying that once the waste, fraud anId abuse were eliminated, budget problems would disappear too.
  

  The left is no less culpable. For decades, Ralph Nader raised money (and consciousness) by telling us that government spending was all perks and corporate welfare, while Sen. William Proxmire ridiculed science spending.

It ain't possible to get fiscally healthy without taking a lot of short and mid-term political and economic pain. Americans are not going to vote for that. We will continue to spend ourselves out of global economic and political relevance. Our system and society don't deal well with hard choices unless they are forced on us by really dire circumstances. They aren't dire enough yet to make us change. And that's is sad.
- posted by john @ 12:48 PM