A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

We’ve all got issues

I can get behind the idea that the long-term debt is an issue we need to address. What I don’t get is the urgency it’s attracted in our current political debate.

Just off the top of my head, I can think of any number of more pressing issues:

–Global warming
–Unemployment
–Global poverty
–Nuclear proliferation

I leave adding to the list as an exercise for the reader.

I’m also pretty skeptical that conservative Republicans are actually that worried about the debt, considering they want to rule out tax increases (including, apparently, closing loopholes) as part of the solution. It’s almost as if what they really object to is domestic government spending that benefits non-rich people.

And from the President’s perspective, does he really think people are more likely to vote based on his plan for reducing the debt than on whether or not they have a job?

4 responses to “We’ve all got issues”

  1. Bruce Salem

    The GOP may be simply anti-govt., but worse they are in cahoots with a world plutocracy that wants to steal American wealth. Many supporters of GOP are investors in the world economy. Their interests now oppose the interests of a majority in America, so they want to defund the govt, and rob the people. They are not the patriots they imagined they were, even after 9-11. There plan was to use war and global Capitalism to bilk the US. Their current attitude is a result of their having succeeded.

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  2. Gaius Sempronius Gracchus

    The growth of American poverty is not on your list.

    Nor the damage the government is about to do to the American elderly and poor who depend almost exclusively on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

    Nor the abandonment of many of the American poor who depend on food stamps.

    Nor the marked decline of the American working class.

    Nor the decline of democracy in America to the advantage of the American plutocracy.

    Nor the massive expansion of inequality in America in the last four decades.

    Nor the slide to the right of the Democratic Party and its progressive abandonment of the Great Society, the New Deal, and big-government liberalism in general.

    These are not on your list of things more pressing than the US national debt.

    Why is that?

    Are you an American, or am I mistaken about that?

    Or do you perhaps imagine yourself a “citizen of the world,” as cosmopolitan liberals sometimes say of themselves?

    Reply
  3. Gaius Sempronius Gracchus

    Well, you did list unemployment, and one has to assume you meant American unemployment.

    Sorry I went off that way.

    It’s just that a key part of the problem is that even distressed liberals reflect the globalist, cosmopolitan outlook of the ruling class that has abandoned America and the American people under cover of a broader moral outlook refusing to “privilege” our country and our people over Indonesians or would-be immigrants competing for the same jobs.

    Sometimes I am too quick to see that outlook where it is not.

    My apologies.

    Reply
  4. Lee

    Yes, I do believe a government’s first responsibility is to its own citizens and I’d happily add any number of the items from you mention to a list of issues that are more pressing than the long-term debt.

    Reply

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