Earlier this evening, the credit rating of the United States was reduced from AAA to AA. The phrase ‘the full faith and credit of the United States’ was made obsolete at the same time.
How did it come to this? Who is to blame? Democrats have traditionally spent and spent. Come George W. Bush and the Republicans started spending as fast as the Democrats of old. The newcomers, the Tea Party Republicans want to slash and burn through the government like Sherman’s March to the Sea.
There is no common sense in Washington, and I fear it comes down to our two-party system of government. Politicans are too afraid to buck party lines for fear of being blackballed. Recognize that both the Democrats and the Republicans are more and more controlled by extremists. Liberals on the left and Tea Party Reactionaries on the right. Oh, the Tea Party claims to be fiscally conservative, but that is an illusion. Jack Kemp was a fiscal conservative. He understood the importance of paying bills already owed.
True, this is a problem that has been decades in the making, but the two major parties in this country simply will not negotiate. The American public was held hostage to raise the debt ceiling. We were livid about the situation, yet the politicians waited until the 11th hour and cobbled together a budget agreement that, yes, will cut some spending, but it will also thrust us into a second recession while unemployment is still over 9%.
See, the “fiscally conservative” Tea Party Republicans want to ensure the wealthiest 4% of our citizens keep extremely low tax rates because this creates jobs, like all the jobs that were created over the past 4 years. Those years, I should point out, passed while the tax rates on these people was as low as it is now. Where are those jobs? India. Mexico. China.
The Old School Republicans forced deregulation on a number of industries, including banking. Wealthy bankers caused the recession that supposedly ended in the summer of 2009. They made money on bad mortgages. We bailed them out. Now, they are making money off of us during this recession.
Democrats are not innocent either. Stimulus programs and foreclosure relief programs that, albeit started under Bush, were mainly supported by the current administration. These have been complete and utter disasters. Money is frozen, people who need help never even learn about the programs, and still the banks foreclose, in some instances on homes they have absolutely no legal basis to foreclose.
When do we call game over? When will we demand change? People are leaving both major parties in droves, and becoming independent. I was proud to be a Republican during the Contract With America days. It was a time of good government when we actually managed to get the deficit under control. For a year to so, I thought there was hope. I finally quit the Republican party last year, after considering the move for five or six years. I am another independent.
The problem is, the parties nominate their extreme candidates and the independents have no voice in the primaries. Thus, a good portion of the American voting population must select between a candidate who is too far to the left, and an opponent who is too far to the right. Common sense loses out to ideology. Moderates have no voice.
