The Debt Ceiling: A Congressional Centrifuge

For the pass month congress and the president have been fiercely debating a new budget to justify raising the debt ceiling and preventing America’s first debt default.  With no major election for the next 16 months, you would think that congressmen would look past their careers in the face of impending crises. You would be wrong.  Republicans and Democrats have grown increasingly polarized, the former showing an unprecedented amount of stubbornness. When senate minority leader Mitch McConnell proposed a reasonable centrist budget that gathered presidential, as well as bipartisan, approval, house majority leader Eric Cantor called on his party members to reject the bill for its concessions. Instead the Ryan budget and the GOP’s “Cut, Cap, and Balance” legislation are the ones being advanced, bills that raise not a single tax but more or less dismantle Medicare and Medicaid.

                                                 

To raise revenue or lower spending; that is the question.

Despite how different these two concepts seem, the end result for both is a lot more similar to the average than congress would have you believe. They both raise the price of living; only taxes spread the burden across the entire population, while spending cuts in social security programs are disproportionately detrimental to the poor. In a country where the income gap has been steadily growing and the continued bush era tax cuts have prevented the elite from feeling the impact of the damage they dealt the global economy in 2008, it seems ridiculous for Republicans to be so vehemently opposed to tax rate increases.  As college education, the strongest income booster available, becomes ever more expensive, the income gap problem is compounded and perpetuated to the point where America is starting to lose its famed social mobility that is the essence of the “American Dream”.

While its reasonable that politicians, who get most of their funding from wealthy donors and lobbies, should have a preference for the rich slightly above the threshold of common sense, the fact that a Majority of Republicans are not willing to compromise with budget policies really makes you wonder whether they care about the country at all.  Clinging to Reagonomics like captains of a sinking ship, Republicans are spreading the wreckage to the U.S’ hull and if they don’t plug up the hole soon, a much bigger ship will soon be underwater.