I ended up being proud of Colorado. I was worried Bennet would lose to Buck even though Bennet's voting record in the past two years has been exemplary. In my lowest moments I thought it possible that Tancredo could end up being our next governor, thereby ranking Colorado right up there with Minnesota and Illinois as states who need to duck their collective heads when gubernatorial discussions commence, but Colorado didn't fall prey to Tancredo's One Trick Pony campaign. I guess the state's electorate agreed that illegal immigration is not the only vital issue facing Colorado as Tancredo's ads proclaimed. And if Tancredo won that would have meant that ballot initiatives 60, 61, and 101 would have probably won as well. But my fellow Coloradans wisely voted down all of those issues by huge margins. Not only that, but more school bond issues passed than failed. So, even though the economy is everyone's main issue and distrust of government is on everyone's minds, we managed to vote reasonably in the midst of a nation wide electorate who, if television pundits were correct (have you noticed that they almost never are), cast its vote based on nothing more than a knee jerk reaction.
Second, I promised myself that I would not get angry about things. I remember a little dialogue I had two years ago with one of the conservative minions who haunt the Y during the morning hours.
"You're one of those liberals who believe everything Obama says, aren't you?" he asserted.
"No, but unlike my republican friends, I don't think that everything he says is a lie," I responded.
During the past two years that gentleman, who is actually quite likable if you can manage to confine the discussion to the weather and good places to go for green chili, and all of his like minded friends took delight in any failure that team Obama suffered. The fact that those failures, few though they were, also meant that the country as a whole suffered was and continues to be lost on those folks.
So, I promised myself that in addition to not getting angry I would also be happy about any successes the republican controlled house might achieve. I think it would be great if somehow all of our economic problems got solved through the bi-partisan action of the newly empowered republicans in the house and the new chastened administration.
I even promised myself to look at the next two years with interest to see how everything was going to work itself out. In order to fulfill that promise I have to do a few things. I have to NEVER look at cable news, whether that be Fox or MSNBC. I have to NEVER listen to talk radio. If I read a newspaper, I must NEVER turn to the op-ed pages. No more Frank Rich. No more Tom Friedman. No more Paul Krugman. I must confine myself to those articles in The New Yorker about ballet and movies and developments in third world countries. No more economic analyses. No more inside scoops on Washington infighting. I have to confine myself to reading fiction. No more political treatises. If I go to a party I have to be careful to stick to small talk. You know, gossip about people who are not in attendance. Clever quips about obscure news items. Concern over how drug violence in Mexico might interrupt my travel plans. Stuff like that. It is going to be a dreary two years, but at least I will remain sane.
I mean if I really dwelled on Mitch McConnel's professed goal of the republican party, to make sure Obama was a one-termer, I might get a little upset. It seems to me that a good republican goal would be to make the country a better place, but then I realize that if any of the country's problems were solved while Obama was still in the White House the republican plan to unseat him would be compromised. It is clear that the worst thing that could happen in the next two years to the republican party would be if Health Care actually made people's lives better, or if the economy sprang back to life and people were getting hired right and left. That is a continuing republican nightmare.
I've promised myself to stop being a smart-ass if I somehow get involved in a political discussion, but instead just ask polite questions. For instance, I would like to know how my republican friends can reconcile their repeated calls for a balanced budget with their refusal to even consider letting the Bush tax cuts expire on those making more than $250,000 a year. I would have a bunch of questions for them:
1. Since you refuse to extend unemployment benefits without demanding that the administration and the democrats account for every penny of the cost with a corresponding budget cut, would you be willing to do the same accounting with the $700,000,000,000 it would cost to keep the tax cuts?
2. Since Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and defense spending account for more than 85% of the federal budget, exactly what are you willing to cut to make up for the $700,000,000,000 the tax cuts would cost?
3. If your response is to simply pare back Medicaid and Medicare, what do you plan to do with the proliferation of homeless sick people that would result? I mean wouldn't it cost big bucks to build a nation wide system of poor houses and debtor prisons? Or are we just going to let these people get sick and die on the streets? I mean homeless people already constitute a blight on the urban landscape. Wouldn't the 2% of the population with their tax cuts firmly in place be even more upset by sickly homeless people. If we are going to have the poor with us always, shouldn't we at least do something to make them look good as they congregate around super highway underpasses? Otherwise, it could get downright depressing. I mean look what happened to Sandra Bullock when she was confronted by only one pretty healthy homeless kid in The Blind Side. She had to stop going to lunch at swanky places with her tax sheltered friends. Wouldn't that just about devastate the economy?
Shift gears.
If I were a democratic strategist (god, there is a horrible thought), I would shamelessly borrow the following idea from Gary Hart. A couple of weeks ago in his blog (A Matter of Principle)he cited the Esquire Commission to Balance the Federal Budget. A group of former legislators got together and devised a plan to balance the budget by 2020. Mr. Hart suggested that it would be pretty cool, not to mention telling, if the recommendations of the commission were put before congress with an up or down vote just to see how serious everyone really was about balancing the budget. I would actually be willing to watch CSPAN for such an occasion.
In order to help myself remember the commission's proposals I will briefly enumerate them here.
Social Security
-Gradually raise the retirement age to 70 with allowances made for those people with the kind of manual labor jobs that would constitute a disability if they worked that long.
-Use a different, more realistic method, to figure cost of living (COLA) adjustments.
-Increase the number of years used to figure the monthly benefit.
Projected Savings: $86 billion
Defense
-Enact the administration's proposed weapons systems cuts.
-Reverse the "Grow the Army" initiative.
-Restructure the military so as to more accurately reflect the changing reality of conflicts.
-Assume the cost of Afghanistan and Iraq will decline.
Projected Savings: $309 billion
Health Care
-Institue medical malpractice reforme through the establishment of medical courts.
-Assume the recent Health Care Reform will stay pretty much in tact because when it gets right down to it most of the provisions when they are explained sans spin make sense.
-Change from a fee-for-service system to a pay-for-performance system (this is where Obama's health care initiative started before being watered down by special interests).
Projected Savings: $10 billion
Other Spending
-Enact the president's proposed spending program terminations as detailed in his 2011 budget.
-Cut the federal work force by 5%.
-Delay future NASA missions to the moon and Mars.
-Reform (read: get rid of) farm subsidies.
-Eliminate all earmarks.
-As with Social Security, use a more realistic and accurate method to figure COLA for military pensions and veterans' retirement benefits.
Projected Savings: $71 billion
Total Projected Savings from all areas: $476 billion
Total Debt Service Projected Savings (servicing the debt will obviously decrease given all of the projected savings): $142 billion
Grand Total of Projected Savings: $618 billion
New Revenue Proposals
-Repeal health-care tax exclusion; offer a refundable health-care tax credit.
Projected Revenue: $63 billion
-Increase gasoline tax by $1 per gallon.
Projected Revenue: $130 billion
-Limit itemized deductions for high earners (this is different from letting the Bush tax cuts expire).
Projected Revenue: $57 billion
-Keep tax rates low for the next decade for everyone.
Projected Revenue: -$273 billion
-Curtail state and local sales-tax deduction that tax payers are allowed on their federal taxes.
Projected Revenue: $12 billion
-Eliminate subsidies for biofuels.
Projected Revenue: $16 billion
-Include all new state and local government workers in Social Security (goodbye PERA)
Projected Revenue: $21 billion
Total Projected Revenue Increase $26 billion
Final Numbers
Total Projected Revenues in 2020: $4.693 trillion (20.8% of GDP)
Total Projected Spending in 2020: $4.681 trillion (20.8% of GDP)
Total Projected Surplus in 2020: $12 billion
Projected Debt-to-GDP ratio in 2020: 52% (currently that ratio is significantly higher than 60%)
Let us have an up or down vote on that and see where everyone stands. You have to agree that there are things for everyone to like about this report and things for everyone to hate. It is kind of like life.
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