Compromise

Throughout these debt debates one of the things that has bothered me the most is all these people calling for so called “compromise.” Many in the media and on a lot of the blogs that I have Stumbleuponed say that politicians need to come together in order to get a debt deal done. Conservative Republicans and Tea Party caucus members have remained entrenched on many issues, resulting in mostly Democratic politicians, including the President, calling upon Republicans to negotiate and come up with a deal that includes the best ideas from both sides. But is compromise actually good for the American people?

               
 I agree that compromise can be good. Your stomach tells you that eating an entire cake would be a great idea, but your mind tells you that you should be eating healthy stuff like brussel sprout casserole. So you compromise and have half a pineapple pizza and a slice of cake for dessert. Your girlfriend wants to see the latest VRC (Vampire Romance Crap) movie, but you would rather see Rocky 17. So you compromise and see Kung-Fu Panda 2 or a mild Rom-Com (or if you can afford to go the Dollar Theatre twice in one night you compromise by seeing both the VRC and Rocky 28).

But in the world of economic policy there’s very little room for compromise. When the battle is between Keynesian Democrats and Austrian Republicans, where is the middle ground? If we all see the other sides pill as poison and our own as the antidote, should we take half a pill of poison and half a pill of antidote. Or maybe we could each take one of your cyanide pills and one of my antidotes for arsenic poisoning. If the Democrats say taxes are too low and Republicans say taxes are too high, wouldn’t compromise be to do nothing. When Democrats say we need more spending and Republicans say we need less, would compromise be to spend exactly what are doing now. Or maybe the Democrats should get their way on taxes and Republicans should get their way on spending. But to a Republican voting for higher taxes is like voting for higher unemployment, less consumer spending, dying small businesses, and ultimately less tax revenue. Likewise Democrats voting for spending cuts are voting for starving kids, dying grandparents, and higher unemployment. Regardless of what result you may think these ideas may have, do you really want politicians voting for higher unemployment, dying small businesses, and starving children? 

“So what should we do?” you may ask. I think the main thing that could fix our country is honesty. If people are honest with themselves and honest with each other and have open, honest debate then solutions should come somewhat easily. However, this is a long process; not unintentionally, mind you, the Founding Fathers created our Congressional system to be slow so that politicians would have time to research and debate the merits of each and every having it put to a vote. 

There should almost never be a crisis like we are having currently where we have 2 weeks to come with a solution or the economy will supposedly go down the drain. Politicians saw this coming from a mile away. Every time this question of the public debt has come up, most everyone has just agreed to ignore it and raise the debt limit without doing to fix the problem that is creating all this debt. We can all agree that the huge amounts of debt are a bad thing, just not at the same time. When Bush was President, Democrats said his tax cuts and military spending were increasing the debt and ruining the economy. Now that Obama is President, Republicans are saying that his stimulus spending and proposed tax hikes on the rich are increasing the debt and ruining our economy. Each side is so entrenched in their ideas that they can’t agree on what is the cause of the problem. And they can’t agree how to fix it because each side thinks the other sides solution to the problem is actually what caused it in the first place. Now don’t get me wrong, unwaveringly sticking to ones beliefs is a good thing: like I said, we don’t want politicians voting for what they think will ruin the country. But without researching ones ideas, debating with others, and constantly challenging and reevaluating ones point of view, we are just going to continue having the same old problems.