Cynical Manipulation

So far the ongoing arguments over federal budgeting and debt ceilings have drawn little interest from me. With Dems in control of the presidency and senate and GOP the house, neither can get their way. So both sides instead are choosing to play the issues for votes.

The GOP likes to talk a lot about a balanced budget amendment as the main thing they want to get in return for agreeing to extend the debt ceiling. Not that such a constitutional amendment wouldn't be desirable - of course it would. But there's no way it will happen. From my perspective it's like negotiating with a mugger, saying "you can have my wallet now if you promise never to rob me again". Completely meaningless.

On the other hand, the outrageous rhetoric from the Democrats is led by none other than the President himself, who never seemed to get the memo that American presidents are supposed to be above such extreme partisan demagoguery as threatening to withhold Social Security checks if he doesn't get is way.

Which reportedly led to seniors flooding the phone lines of congressional republicans, scaring the digested and undigested waste from their bowels by demanding they don't let Obama's threat become a reality.

It seems pretty clear at this stage that those ideas popular on the right will simply not happen in this divided government. There won't be a balanced budget amendment, which can only pass the house. Spending won't be cut to levels that allow the debt limit to be held at current levels. Obamacare won't be repealed to help cut its trillion or two from spending projections. Paul Ryan's proposals won't see the light of day in the senate.

All the GOP can hope to accomplish is a modest package of spending cuts with some so-called "tax reform" that closes some loopholes but doesn't increase anybody's rates. And nothing substantial will take place to fix the underlying problem.

The Democrats on the other hand won't get their tax increases on the evil "rich". They can't lean on their favored dishonest definition of spending cuts, which to them is defined as deciding not to increase expenditures quite as much as they hoped.

Something will get done that will turn out to be mostly meaningless. Then the campaign season will kick off in earnest, with each side's message already set:

Democrats will campaign by saying that if you elect the Republican, seniors will lose their social security and medicare, kids won't be able to pay back their student loans, children will starve and catch terrible diseases because the republicans won't let them see a doctor.

Republicans will campaign on the 9.2% unemployment rate, the horrible Obama economy, oppressive government regulation, and a free-spending Democrat party machine that will bankrupt the country and drive us into anarchy while exposing us to a terrorist invasion.

Whether or not the problem is actually solved and the average American's life has a chance to improve instead of decline in the rest of the decade depends on whether there are enough voters who cut through the bull excrement and vote in the person more likely to help solve the problem instead of make it worse.

Which for me means anybody who is not Obama, Pelosi, Reid, Schumer, Durbin, or their partisan friends. The recent special election in New York, where the false characterization of Ryan's Medicare proposals actually worked to elect the Democrat doesn't seem to bode well.