Baby Steps

There is a schism brewing in the Republican Party over the Paul Ryan-Patty Murray budget deal … just at the wrong time … see: Business Insider Article.  This revolt revolves around the fact that this “bipartisan” deal raises taxes (“fees”) and also increases spending (through sequester rollbacks).  The tea-party branch of the GOP rankles at this Democrat-lite solution … while the establishment Republicans believe that this deal will remove this budget issue from the table for the 2014 elections.  In other words, "take what we can get and move on (baby steps … or incrementalism) and we will have more leverage after the elections."

I am sympathetic to both positions. However, one argument that has caught my attention is that Democrats have used incrementalism for generations to get us into the dire predicament in which we find ourselves today … a debt abyss from which it is almost impossible to extract ouselves.  So, if the Republicans now try to adopt incrementalism as their solution, they are once again playing the Democrats’ game. Yes, I realize that not playing this game jeopardizes Republican chances in 2014, but then I strongly suspect that our Kardashian-obsessed American electorate will not wake up to our real fiscal peril until confronted with the cataclysm that awaits if we continue down the fiscal path blazed by the progressives among us.

Being babied is seldom an effective cure for self-indulgence.