8 February 2011 Which side are you on, Congress

Posted at 4:43 PM ET, 02/ 7/2011

The real budget solution

By E.J. Dionne



“Nothing is more annoying to a columnist than another columnist who gets to an idea you had planned to write about before you do. And with that, I salute The New Republic's Jonathan Chait for his excellent column in the current issue of the magazine. (Subscription required).

The thrust of the column is that the best way to take a huge chunk out of the deficit and put the country on a sound fiscal cushion is to do nothing -- specifically, to do nothing at the end of 2012 when all the Bush tax cuts expire. If Congress doesn't act, the Bush tax cut is gone. The tax rates we had under Bill Clinton are restored. And everything about the deficit becomes easier.”



Cassi Creek:

Dionne spells it out quite clearly. We need to allow the Bush tax cuts to expire in 2012. We need the revenue to keep the nation solvent. In the Clinton era, tax revenues were so sufficient as to allow a tax surplus when Clinton left office.

The subsequent Bush tax cuts, two unfunded wars, and the Medicare prescription plan – of much more benefit to Pharm houses and insurance companies than seniors - ran through the surplus like water from a broken main. We lost our surplus, received instead a rapidly increasing deficit that, if unchecked, will make us a third world nation with unemployed citizens chanting for jobs in the streets. From a distance, we won’t be able to tell if it is Gaza or Georgetown, Alabama or Algeria. And it won’t matter, as the jobs won’t be there for anyone.

Congress, those people who just finished telling us how much they love this nation so that we would elect them, needs to decide whether they are working for U.S, citizens, who voted them into office and pay their salaries; or Corporate America, which can only buy votes and pay for lots of under the table items while feeding re-election campaigns. Congress has the chance to prove their supposed patriotism in 2012. They can ignore the demands for renewing the Bush tax cuts and start making a serious effort to save the nation from debt. Or they can do what the GOP/teavangelists want them to do and sell out once again to the people with the big checkbooks and the checks that never show up as personal revenue. That will tell us which side they are on. I know what I’d like to believe about our elected leaders. But I believe that I already know which side they are on.