WHEN WILL WASHINGTON GET IT?

Every day I read the news of a crisis in this country. We have a fiscal crisis, a water crisis, a debt crisis, a mortgage crisis, a home price crisis, food crisis, and on and on. What is amazing to me is that there does not seem to be sense of urgency in Washington to do anything productive to get us out of the current multiple “crisis” enveloping our great Nation.

There are probably several reasons for this but not all of them are political in nature. Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal wrote “If you are from the deep left, if you're on the leftward ridges of the Democratic Party, you believe in high spending, higher taxing and a more dominant role for the federal government. So you wouldn't be alarmed at the current crisis, you'd be more or less happy: You're sort of getting what you want. If you're told entitlement spending will ultimately force severe cuts in America's defenses, you might think, "Good, fewer guns, more butter." Since you likely think America is a prime source of trouble in the world, you wouldn't be too concerned that nations that hold our debt might come to exert influence on our foreign-policy choices. In the new and emerging global world, what's so bad about a more bridled America?”

But this opinion belongs to just the very far left of our country.  Most of us are not far left in our leanings.  I have no issue if you are, but I see a country that is mostly in the center. The problem I have, why are the more moderate “level headed” of our political class not in any rush to solve the problems we are clearly having and work together to get things done? Why were they all off for a week vacation during “President’s Week”?  I don’t get it.  Did any of you get a week off for the holiday?  Not sure what I am seeing here. If the fiscal crisis is so important, why take off a week. Why not hammer out a deal that everyone finds reasonably fair, and end the madness?  

I believe the problem is that there are too many members of the Senate and the House that have been in their positions for a decade or more. Some of these guys have been in there for 30 plus years.  The country has seen various crises loom up at various times and these people have become immune to the effects.  They know that we’ve weathered every storm that has come our way, and don’t see anything now as all that urgent for their attention.  While the rest of us are being pummeled by lower housing prices, high food, oil and gas prices, looming inflation and rising interest rates, chaos in the Middle East, we know that something is different now. Something is changing right before our eyes. They think they can do anything and America will always be rich. That is clearly not the case anymore.

Many of today’s political leaders just don’t see the problem that the rest of us see and are now living through.  They get paid a nice amount of money, take off for what seems like a huge amount of time every year, and travel on our dime all over the world on junkets that have little to do with their actual job.  Ms. Noonan writes “It is really convenient and pleasant not to see a crisis, because if you don't see it, you don't have to do anything about it. You don't have to be brave, you don't have to put yourself on the line, and you don't have to lead. You can tell yourself you don't have to be brave and lead because really, at the end of the day, despite all the screaming, there is no crisis.”

The sense of detachment that I see in Washington is amazing.  It’s like the wealthy kid who has a family with wealth stretching back till the dawn of time, so the kid does not see any other way to live.  Sometimes we see the children of the uber rich slide down into all kinds of mischief. Not all of them of course. There are notable and extensive exceptions, but you get the point. If you have lived your entire life at the public trough, you need to come up for air on occasion and see what the heck is happening around you. This country needs a better plan. The old one is done for. I don’t have the answers but at least I am willing to ask the question.

What are your thoughts on this?