Defining the Mandate

Deborah Venable

01/22/11

After the recent distraction of our obviously “uncivil discourse” causing individual lunacy, eventually we must get to the meat and potatoes of what’s going on in the world.

Repealing or fixing Obamacare and whether or not to raise the debt ceiling appear at the front of the newly elected Congress’ agenda. While the enlightened ones in the media are attempting to tell us just how futile the conservative view is on both, the uncivil discourse continues to hog the headlines. How convenient.

Well, Congress, you have your mandate from the American people on both agenda items. Question is, will you act on that mandate or shuffle off to the back rooms to do even more political wheeling and dealing?

While our chief executive is busy extending the red carpet and other lavish ceremony to the Communist Chinese dictator at taxpayer expense, kowtowing to “previously” Communist Russian demands to cut back our defenses, and lecturing Americans to be more civil, Congress is beginning to worry the bone of increasing the debt ceiling. The House passed the repeal Obamacare bill with the Senate looking down its nose the whole time. Not surprising.

Oh yeah – we’ve started this year out just swell, folks!

I smell a rat when I hear so-called tea party conservatives quibble about raising the debt ceiling. I especially hate an increasingly irritating elite media acting as if the whole subject is over the heads of average Joe Blow citizens.

Let’s consider this from an individual standpoint, shall we?

Times have been tough. The economy isn’t so good right now, so individual American, Mr. Joe Blow, sits at his desk covered with bills and says, “Gee, I think I need to raise my debt ceiling. If I don’t, I won’t be able to borrow more money to pay next month’s bills.”

Now, what does he have to do to accomplish that? What’s more, just what IS his debt ceiling?

Let’s relate this to a phenomenon that too many individuals can probably understand. In the last quarter century or so, credit cards have become the magic trick that individuals and business entities alike turn to far too often to solve financial dilemmas. Once upon a time, if one wanted to borrow money, he had to go to the source and convince the lender that he’d be “good for it” – that is, that the lender would get his money back. Now, however, the great majority of private “loans” in this country are done the other way around. The lender seeks out potential “customers” because credit has become a lucrative product to sell. Mass mailings of credit card offerings and even mortgage financing keep the postal service swimming in snail mail spam – even as the payments plus interest swim backwards against the current.

Credit lines are extended in the comfort of one’s own home simply by replying to one of these offers, and perhaps only via telephone or a computer click!

Interest rates on these types of “loans” are appalling and totally unrealistic in yesterday’s real world, but they are happily agreed to by any number of folks who may have even already defaulted on previous such agreements. Nowadays, most savvy individuals would never dream of living without that line of credit provided by that ever-increasing number of little plastic cards they carry around in their wallets. You can do anything with a credit card these days. If you do not have a credit card, there are many things that you CANNOT do, however. If you are not willing to borrow the money you spend (with interest) you are a limited individual in today’s world.

An individual, therefore, can now raise his personal debt ceiling at a moment’s notice, and get on with life. Can we blame our government for having carried this forth into running the business of the government?

Let that sink in for just a moment.

Politics – especially D.C. politics – is so convoluted that we now have our newly elected, more fiscally responsible Congress telling us that this raising the debt ceiling debate is just what the doctor ordered for conservatives to realize some big wins. WHAT??? Now the whole debt ceiling issue is going to be used as a leverage point to obtain liberal concessions?

Folks, I can put links in this article to illustrate what I’m saying here, but surely anyone reading it has heard the rhetoric. The horror stories coming from those “oh so more enlightened” economists telling us that the United States government is just too big to fail – we must not default! Now some of our conservative “young guns” are even telling us that their votes on raising the debt ceiling can be bought with liberal Democrat agreements to as yet undefined spending cuts. Just how naïve do they think we are?

The scare tactics being discussed for weeks now also passes judgment on the intelligence of taxpaying Americans. I’m sure you’ve heard that the first programs to be cut would involve such sensitive expenditures as police, fire fighters, teachers, social security – oh and of course, the military. Just about every government in this country, local, state, and federal have threatened such cuts – first – unless it can keep on borrowing or getting otherwise “subsidized” to stay in operation. I find that an insult to my intelligence.

While all of these entities could use some cleaning up and slimming down in their budget departments, there are far too many more that we just do not need at all. We need only a small portion of the many regulatory agencies and their bloated staffs of people and resources, and we certainly do NOT need to create any new ones.

But, in a world where progressives can convince any portion of a thinking public that Obamacare is a good idea – especially for budgetary reasons for the country, anything is possible I guess.

Here is what I think the message to the newly elected Congress was back in November, but please correct me if I’m wrong: Most of the American people want to work within the system, (through elections and Congress doing what it is supposed to do) to stop policies that are bankrupting our progeny for decades to come. Stop outrageous government spending in its tracks, wipe out bad law, and pave the way for a freedom loving, capitalist society to rev up the engine of the most amazing economy the world has ever seen in operation once again.

That certainly does not include selling the idea of increasing government debt to accommodate back room wheeling and dealing to throw voters a few breadcrumbs. We want the whole damned loaf!

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