Curmudgeon's Corner

Wow! A Senate Budget?

Posted by Al Campbell on March 2, 2013

U.S., Political, Taxes, Quality of Life, Economy

The U.S. Senate is now saying that it will actually prepare a budget, the first one in four years even though that is an annual requirement which the Senate leader, and the media, has managed to ignore for the past three years. 

We have been watching the back and forth over sequester with the President working diligently to load the blame for this entirely upon the backs of the Republicans.  Gallup shows he has been successful with 53% believing the Republicans are the party most responsible for this impasse while 47% believe it is the Democrats who are most responsible.  I am frankly surprised the polling was this close given the effort, and taxpayer expense, the President has gone to in order to come out on top of this issue from the purely political point-of-view.  If we introduce the word “prudent” vs. “political”, I wonder if the polling might’ve been different.

Making the claim, in essence, that the Democrats have been the ‘adult in the room’, while the Republicans sulk and pout like little children, in any number of settings in the past month, the President should’ve gotten this division to be even greater than it appears to be.

His apocalyptic rhetoric has now given way to him admitting there will be no apocalypse as the result of sequester.  He is adamant that we don’t have a spending problem, only a funding problem that the Republicans can quickly resolve by going along with more tax increases than they already gave him in the ‘fiscal cliff’ solution.

All this, of course, happening with not so much as a whimper from what passes as the national press corps, with minor exceptions when the dean of that group felt he had been threatened by the White House.  Even then, the bulk of the media didn’t jump to his aid.

Any President who feels the need to remind us that he knows he isn’t “the Dictator” is concerning to me.  It is reminiscent of another President, Nixon, who laid claim to not being “a crook” during the exploding Watergate saga.

We have a dysfunctional national government; that is more pronounced than at almost any time I can recall in the many years I’ve been alive and aware.  I am close to believing that a dysfunctional government is very much to be appreciated in contrast to the totally subservient government being sought by this President.

We have the possibility of a government “shutdown” coming up soon unless Congress acts to again increase the debt limit.  The opposition party is trying to position itself to avoid the massive beat down that is possible over that issue.  That party had better get its so-called “messaging” stuff together because the President has only just begun the perpetual campaigning we have seen to date.