Trent Lott resides approximately 3 nano-blips above Tom & Jerry in the paradigm of functional intelligence.
Haven't you heard, neither party cares about real spending cuts...
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The Grand Old Plot Against the Tea Party - NYT Frank Rich
Trent Lott, the former Senate leader and current top-dog lobbyist, gave away the game in July. “We don’t need a lot of Jim DeMint disciples,” he said, referring to the South Carolina senator who is the Tea Party’s Capitol Hill patron saint. “As soon as they get here, we need to co-opt them.”
What the Tea Party ostensibly wants most — less government spending and smaller federal deficits — is not remotely happening on the country club G.O.P.’s watch. The elites have no serious plans to cut anything except taxes and regulation of their favored industries. The party’s principal 2010 campaign document, its “Pledge to America,” doesn’t vow to cut even earmarks — which barely amount to a rounding error in the federal budget anyway. Boehner has also proposed a return to pre-crash 2008 levels in “nonsecurity” discretionary spending — another mere bagatelle ($105 billion) next to the current $1.3 trillion deficit. And that won’t be happening either, once the actual cuts in departments like Education, Transportation and Interior are specified to their constituencies.
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You know my thoughts already. At their core, both parties are controlled by the non-partisan Washington Spending Machine. Shades of gray in a 3-decade spending orgy. Not left, not right, not liberal, not conservative. Just folks that we've elected to take and spend our money. And they won't stop - for proof see here, here and here.
Word games and semantics are alive on Capitol Hill, meanwhile our nation is choking on debt as we focus on becoming Greece as quickly and seamlessly as possible. Until Republicans have the political courage to propose a deficit solution involving deep spending cuts to entitlements and the Pentagon War Machine, they will remain equally at fault with Democrats for our fiscal ruin.
And don't kid yourselves, annual $1.5 trillion deficits will ruin this nation. Wait until Treasury yields spike as Greenspan warned last week, and the cost of servicing $14 trillion in federal debt skyrockets. By that point it will be too late as interest on the debt will be the majority of the discretionary spending pie.
David Stockman got it right:
- We are not in a conventional business cycle recovery, so stimulus is futile and just adds needlessly to the $9 trillion of Treasury paper already floating dangerously around world financial markets. Instead, after 40 years of profligate accumulation of public and private debt, and reckless money-printing by the Fed, we had an economic crash landing, which left us with an enduring structural breakdown, not just a cyclical downturn.
- The only solution is a long period of debt deflation, downsizing and economic rehabilitation, including a sustained downshift in consumption and corresponding rise in national savings.
Even Glenn Becks gets it:
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