Deck Chairs on the Titanic

Amidst all the fuss and political theater surrounding these last minute negotiations to avoid the so-called "fiscal cliff", let's keep things in perspective by remembering that whatever deal (if any) is reached at the 11th hour, it amounts to no more than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic as it goes down.

First, nothing being proposed in the way of spending cuts or tax increases makes more than an insignificant dent in the truly massive $1 trillion+ per year federal deficit.  To even stop the debt from growing (let alone pay any of it back) we need to cut spending and/or raise taxes by something like a TRILLION dollars a year. Neither party shows any signs of tackling the real problems.  The Republicans, to their credit, at least talk about it, though when in power they didn't do anything about it.  The Democrats won't even acknowledge that the problem exists - a sort of fiscal climate-change denial.

Second, the whole point of the fiscal cliff legislation in the first place was to force Congress and the administration to finally come to grips with the deficit problem.  If they couldn't hammer out an agreement (and they couldn't) then these "automatic" cuts and tax increases would occur anyway. Now they propose to nullify the automatic cuts and tax increases as well.  So the result is, that after four years in office, the Obama administration will have done absolutely NOTHING to deal with the debt and deficit, and many things to make it worse.

 And we, stupid voters that we apparently are, just voted almost all of these people back into office despite their ineffectiveness.

The real crisis, not much discussed in the sensationalist press, is not the impending "fiscal cliff" in the next few days, but the fact that our government is still borrowing the nation into bankruptcy at the rate of about $1,000,000,000,000+ (a million million dollars+) a year and there appears to be no political motivation in either party to deal realistically and effectively with the problem.