It boggles the mind.....

Watching the European debt crisis, California's imploding economy, and our feckless Congress and administration (I include both parties equally here), it boggles the mind that all these political elites continue to live in a never-never land where common sense doesn't seem to matter.  Anyone with an IQ higher than 90 ought to be able to see that if a government (local, state or federal) continually spends more than it takes in, something bad will eventually happen. The only solutions --- and these are the ONLY solutions -- are to (a) increase revenue (higher taxes) and/or (b) cut spending (reduce government payouts).  There simply are no other alternatives, no other magic tricks or "funny money" solutions, unless one wants to allow rampant inflation to reduce the real value of the debt (and our wages, pensions and savings), which in fact is just a back-door way of raising taxes.

In Europe, politicians who advocate either of these common-sense steps seem to get regularly thrown out of office (but the politicians who replace them still face the same realities).  In the US, Democrats refuse to cut spending and Republicans refuse to raise taxes (or cut total spending either, apparently).  It doesn't take a Harvard degree to see that this is not sustainable.

President Obama's class warfare against the rich may be good populist politics, but it does almost nothing to address the real problems. One can't tell what Romney would do as president; he only talks in generalities.

There is a lot of talk among "experts" about the importance of promoting growth, which is a good idea in the abstract, but the only way politicians seem to find to "promote growth" is to spend more government money, which just makes the whole problem worse (and anyway seems to produce little real growth).  And in fact neither in Europe nor in the US is there any realistic prospect of "growing" our way out of our current debt and federal deficit.

Both Europe and the US need serious and substantial structural adjustments to get out of this mess. In the US, we need to clean up and simplify the tax code, reduce (not eliminate, but sharply reduce) federal regulation in many fields, massively overhaul our educational system so that we produce a young work force adapted to today's competitive world economy, massively reduce the size and scope of our federal government (including the military), and sharply prune back the current entitlement programs.  Of course these are painful steps, and inevitably will result in people losing benefits and jobs.  That raises the predictable howls from everyone whose favorite entitlement or benefit would be reduced or eliminated.  But if we don't deal with these problems, we will eventually all be in far worse shape

Can anyone sell this to the American people, or have we become like the Greeks -- unwilling to face reality and prepared to throw out any politician or political party who is brave enough to try to solve the real problems?