I wonder if MacGyver would be able to fix this budget problem: According to usdebtclock.org, our national debt is approximately $13.7 trillion and the deficit is $1.4 trillion. If you divide $13.7 trillion by the number of U.S. citizens, everyone owes around $45,000 to the federal government. Needless to say, it is an economic Rubik's cube of outrageous proportions. Recently, The New York Times created an online application where you can literally attempt to fix the deficit. I'm starting to think that Obama is awake for nights on end, insanely refreshing the Times' results page and Facebook, searching for an answer to our nation's (arguably) largest problem.
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Obama's most recent screw-up: the creation of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. Erskine Bowles, a Democrat, and Alan Simpson, a Republican, lead this handy-dandy panel of "bipartisan" fun, except both chairmen have known small-government ideologies. If you want to reach across the aisle, do it the right way or don't do it at all: The Commission should have been led by the real right and left, like Rep. Ron Paul and Sen. Bernie Sanders. Now that would've been interesting.
Here's what the Bowles-Simpsons get-together came up with after what seems to have been countless hours of playing Apples to Apples and drinking Jack Daniels:
Cut our military spending
No shit. Where were these "deficit hawks" in the early 2000s? Any person who opens up a textbook on Afghanistan would know that once you enter the country, you are not coming out anytime soon without losing your wallet in the sand. And we still have a military base in West Germany with thousands of troops stationed there — just in case East Germany wants to throw down again.
Curb-stomp Social Security
I'm hoping that we, like the French, will have a nationwide protest if anyone dares raise the Social Security age from 65 to 69, as proposed by the Bowles-Simpsons plan — and not just because Confucius tells us to respect our elders. The Commission is basing the higher cutoff on the growth in our nation's life expectancy. How can you correlate the two? Modern medicine and all that good stuff is great for our workforce, but physical labor still takes a toll on millions of our older workers. The Bowles-Simpson duo is acting like nurse Ben Stiller in "Happy Gilmore."
"Read my lips: no new taxes"
Time to attack conservative Public Enemy No. 1: taxes. The Bowles-Simpsons plan calls for tax cuts for everybody: by 8 percent for the middle class and 23 percent for the wealthy. This proposal is the Garden of Eden for right-wingers, if the Garden of Eden were made of money. I'm going to be courageous and say the most anti-patriotic phrase of all time: We need higher taxes. We need more revenue, so we're going to close down our streams of revenue? The tax breaks for the wealthy are guilty of creating a national income gap only Hoover would be proud of.
I'm not an economics major, nor could I explain to you the complexities of the 16th Amendment. But I think a toddler who knows that two plus two does not equal one could criticize this plan. Get out your Texas Instruments and start crunching some numbers! Uncle Sam and the rest of us are begging you to.
