Talk about making a mountain out of an anthill. Virtually all the proposals put forth by both sides to save trillions of dollars are illusions, and the people posing them are delusional.
Now our budget problems are all but gone, if you follow the news at all.
Most famous are the accolades Pelosi & Company give themselves for the $1 trillion by which they’ve already reduced the budget. They haven’t reduce the budget one red cent!
They simply assumed the budget would increase 8% for every year over the next ten years, i.e. “baseline budgeting;” and voila – they’ve magically saved $1 trillion by simply staying at current spending levels (which are $1 trillion more than when Obama took office four years ago).
Magical thinking is a precursor to schizophrenia, delusions even more so. Washington has exhibited both symptoms in abundance lately.
Worse yet, both sides have delusions of grandeur that they’ve solved the nation’s budget problems. In fact they’ve done absolutely nothing. Or worse!
The Republicans like the idea of changing how Social Security calculates Cost Of Living Adjustments (COLA). They want to give seniors less by a clever accounting gimmick called “chained COLA.”
They want to take all the fizz out of their lives. They call it Classic COLA.
Chained COLA looks at seniors’ spending habits and adjusts their monthly payments accordingly. They assume if seniors start eating tuna instead of salmon (living in an apartment instead of a house, driving a Hugo instead of a Nissan, etc) that it’s a decision based on taste.
It’s inconceivable to the bean counters in Washington that seniors might be doing so because they can’t afford to buy salmon anymore.
Pity we can’t force Washington to live on “chained budgeting.”
