In “Cutting our way to prosperity?” , Sunday News columnist and associate editor Gil Smart gets three out of four assertions right:
SMART: “If we were really serious about spending cuts we’d be talking about, or also talking about, reducing our global military footprint. But we’re not, and that sends a clear message. Our attempt to maintain global hegemony will continue, regardless of cost.”
WATCHDOG: Yes.
SMART: “Here’s the deal that no one, not even the tea party, is telling you: Cuts of the magnitude we are talking about are going to hit our economy, and your life, like a brick.”
WATCHDOG: Hell no! Barack Obama entered office with a mandate for reforming health care, getting us out of the steep recession, extricating ourselves from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, repairing and improving the nation’s infrastructure, and revitalizing our economy. His goal was strategic government investments that would enable business to leap frog our foreign competitors. He envisioned a greater, not a lesser, America! If the Obama agenda was followed, so do we.
Although he had a Democrat majority in both houses, he was thwarted by the filibuster rule in the Senate and by conservative opposition whose sole goal was to get him out of office in 2012… the country be damned.
Then came the disastrous midterm election of 2010 in which voters expressed their pique by electing a bunch of tea partiers who were ignorant of history and economics and fixated on reducing the national debt. In normal times, this would be both a good idea and natural phenomenon (the Clinton years) but reducing deficit spending is the height of foolishness during a sharp recession.
NewsLanc will soon return to the contention that the American Republic is going the way of the Roman Republic with an accelerating inability to work civilly and to achieve compromise leading to governmental paralysis. As doubt spread as to whether a republican form of government can actually work, the authoritarian governance of China and Russia is fast becoming the model for the world.
