Late Night Chronicles 95: Thoughts on Cliff-Diving

I remember in my Abnormal Psych class, senior year of high school watching a grainy, old school movie about a tribe somewhere in Polynesia that likes to do something almost, but not quite like bungee jumping. Basically, they erect a platform, tie a vine to their ankles and jump. But here's the kicker: they're supposed to hit their heads- not a lot- not like neck-breakingly, potential death hard but just enough to prove how bad-ass they are.

Needless to say, with the news cycle dominated by the mess in Washington over postponing the crisis for another couple of months with this so-called deal they passed, those crazy vine divers have been on my mind quite a bit. Congress, in it's wisdom, has built one heck of a platform of bloated government and debt over the years. Now the vine is around their ankles and they're too chicken-shit to jump.

But they may not have a choice for much longer. I'm not sure what postponing this Fiscal Cliff stuff is going to do. I mean, what do we call it then? Fiscal Cliff 2: THE SEQUEL? Fiscal Cliff 2: This Time, It's Cliffier? We've got to do something- and in the meantime, the polarization of our politics seems more entrentched than ever.

I blame everybody for this. It's a charming habit of mine even though some of my more liberal friends think it makes me sound a lot like a rabid, foaming conservative when I do it. But the fact of the matter is, we can't afford to keep going like this- we're out of control and lurching from crisis to crisis like a drunken sailor and I don't know about the rest of the country, but I'd like the bad bottle of tequila to run dry so we can go home and sleep this off, pretty please?

We're going to have to raise taxes. The Bowles-Simpson Commission recommended doing this through lowering taxes rates, cutting out loopholes and broadening the tax base. Seems pretty good to me. Republicans are going to have to get off their high horses about taxes and the defense budget if we want to fix this. We're in a total mess here and if they want to grab the whole 'fiscally responsible' mantle back in the eyes of the voters, they've got to be more flexible and less ideological on taxes.

But is raising taxes the only option? No, of course not- we're going to have to cut spending as well. Nothing irritates me more than when Liberals start whining about how the rich should pay their fair share. Sure, in a just society, those with more should kick in a little more but we've got a $14 trillion debt and a bloated government that we can't afford. A tax hike on rich people should be on the table, for sure but let's not act like it's a panacea for all our woes either. If we confiscated the networth of the ten richest Americans, we'd get $316 billion out of them. That's it. That's like a drop in the damn bucket.

The 'Deal' to get us passed the fiscal cliff, also included the following:

•$430 million for Hollywood through “special expensing rules” to encourage TV and film production in the United States. Producers can expense up to $15 million of costs for their projects.
•$331 million for railroads by allowing short-line and regional operators to claim a tax credit up to 50 percent of the cost to maintain tracks that they own or lease.
•$222 million for Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands through returned excise taxes collected by the federal government on rum produced in the islands and imported to the mainland.
•$70 million for NASCAR by extending a “7-year cost recovery period for certain motorsports racing track facilities.”
•$59 million for algae growers through tax credits to encourage production of “cellulosic biofuel” at up to $1.01 per gallon.
•$4 million for electric motorcycle makers by expanding an existing green-energy tax credit for buyers of plug-in vehicles to include electric motorbikes.

And this just demonstrates the incredibly frustrating part of how our government works. Everybody wants something. Everybody has jobs or projects on the line and by golly, we the voters expect them to bring home the bacon. Well, I'm officially excusing Iowa's Congressional Delegation from bringing me any bacon. Don't need no algae and I sure as hell am not sure why we need $222 million for rum.

We're going to need to cut spending AND raise revenue- and reform entitlements too (though that's another issue entirely). Everybody in Washington knows it, so why don't they just get on with it then? Privatize Amtrak- hell, really make yourselves popular and privatize the TSA- or we could privatize the Post Office, since it's drowning in red ink anyway. (The Royal Mail is partially privatized I think- and when Germany privatized there's, DHL came out of some portion of that so it's not the worst idea I've ever heard.) There are plenty of small, sensible things we can do now that don't impact the lower or middle classes. It's just a question of political will to do that, which doesn't exist in Washington, I'm starting to think.

The fiscal vine around our ankles isn't growing shorter- it's growing longer. And the longer it gets, the more likely that when the big burly vine diver of reality pushes us off the platform we've created for ourselves, the more likely its going to be that we break our necks when we fall.