Today’s media will become rapturous over pretty much any line of bullshit that is fed to it by the power structure these days. A two-year budget that reduces the deficit by $2.3 billion in ten years, we are told by pundits and the media, is a “triumph of bipartisanship.”
Really? For one thing, a two-year budget can’t do anything in ten years; it’s a two-year budget, not a ten-year budget. At best, it reduces the deficit by $460 million in two years, and $460 million is pocket change. I’m not all that concerned about that; we need to balance the budget eventually, but I’m not one who thinks that there is critical urgency about when we do that.
Politicians are, of course, trying to have their cake and eat it too. Reducing the deficit becomes a priority when the economy improves. Politicians cannot admit that it is not improving, which would allow them to continue the deficit spending, so they crow about how much the economy is improving and give us a lot of bullshit about how they are reducing the deficit by billions (well, two billion), hoping we won’t notice the fiction of the reduction being over ten years while the budget is only two years, and that we will fall for the big number (semi-big number) and not notice that the reduction is less than one percent.
And the only thing bipartisan about this steaming pile of dog crap is that both parties looked at the calendar and realized that it is time to go home for Christmas. They bipartisanly agreed that they did not want to spend Christmas in Washington engaging in another futile exercise of shutting down the government, so they bipartisanly agreed to put a bunch of bogus numbers on paper, bipartisanly label it a “budget,” and bipartisanly ram it through both houses of Congress.
A successful compromise is when neither side likes the result. Right.
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