Paperweight links this past week focused on legislation and political proposals addressing the national and California fiscal crises. Like Sunroom Desk, many other blogs have a community news and political focus and their posts are incorporated equally with nationally-known news media articles. After California’s legislature agreed on a budget, I linked to the Hot Air blog, which commented:
the problem isn’t a lack of taxes — it’s a lack of fiscal discipline and an overly large nanny state. Cutting 10% of California’s budget, which is what this does, is about as effective as cutting 10% of one’s sugar intake for diabetic management. A responsible legislature would redline vast amounts of the state’s bureaucracy, paring it back to a per-capita outlay in alignment with most of the other states in the nation.
Earlier in the week, the Evangelical Outpost discussed President Obama’s mortgage plan and reminded readers of an ancient Roman senator’s skeptical outlook on the redistribution of income. Quoting from Cicero:
“When politicians, enthusiastic to pose as the people’s friends, bring forward bills providing for the distribution of property, they intend that the existing owners shall be driven from their homes. Or they propose to excuse borrowers from paying back their debts.
“Men with those views undermine the very foundations on which our commonwealth depends. In the first place, they are shattering the harmony between one element in the State and another, a relationship which cannot possibly survive if debtors are excused from paying their creditor back the sums of money he is entitled to. Furthermore, all politicians who harbour such intentions are aiming a fatal blow at the whole principle of justice; for once rights of property are infringed, this principle is totally undermined.”
In Chicago there is quite a bit of skepticism and frustration over the stimulus package and the mortgage modification plan. CNBC correspondent Rick Santelli issued the infamous televised rant last week that elicited a direct White House response. Sunroom Desk filed Dennis Byrne’s Chicago Tribute column, The Slow Drip of Financial Ruin, in its links. Byrne says:
Reason is the facility of the mind used to intelligently form judgments, make decisions and solve problems. Emotions are feelings, desires, fears, hates and passionate drives–all of which are the tools that Obama deployed to sell the stimulus package to a gullible public. Endeavor to go through all 1,100 pages of this stuffed piggy and you’ll find little rational connection between the nation’s problems and its solutions–other than if we throw enough money out there, some of it will stick to the wall.
The lightning-like passage of this colossal spending package (amounting to more than the Iraq war) took just three weeks. Congress is supposed to be a deliberative body, making decisions judiciously, openly and unhurriedly. This was steamrolled.
Worse than the insult to the democratic process, however, is the substance of this lunacy. Our national debt will nudge close to 100 percent of gross domestic product, something that hasn’t happened since World War II when the threat to our country was external, mortal and real, and not of our own making.