Looks Like Those Clowns in Congress Did It Again What a Bunch of Clowns

Eugene Robinson: Our clown-effectually Congress

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To say that Congress looked like a clown bear witness this week is an insult to cocky-respecting clowns.

Painful though it may be, allow's review what just happened. Our baronial legislators — aided and abetted past President Obama — manufactured a fake crisis. They so proceeded to handle it then incompetently that they turned it into a real 1.

The bogus "fiscal cliff" — and delight, permit'southward never, e'er employ those words again — was designed as a doomsday mechanism to force Congress and the president to brand tough decisions. But resistance to the very concept of controlling was then fierce that our leaders could manage but to avoid hurtling to their doom, and ours, by deciding non to decide much of anything.

Obama "won" this bloody and unnecessary boxing, but what did he really gain, aside from bragging rights for the adjacent few weeks? More important, what, if anything, did the nation proceeds? Practically nix, except a reprieve from hardships that its elected leaders were bizarrely threatening to impose on the citizens who elected them.

There is widespread agreement that the federal government faces 2 huge tasks. I would rank them in this society: First, encourage the sluggish economic recovery to get together steam, on the proven theory that solid growth makes our other problems much easier to solve. 2nd, take prudent steps to begin addressing our long-term debt problem and put entitlement programs on a sustainable course.

Some people would reverse those priorities and put debt reduction outset. I call up that would exist a error. Let'due south take that argument. But nosotros should all exist able to agree that "none of the above" is non the right answer.

It'due south the answer our leaders gave us, though. The nib that Congress passed and the president signed contains no significant new stimulus to boost the recovery. And while it raises some new revenue by increasing revenue enhancement rates for households earning more than $450,000 a year, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Part estimates that the bill actually adds $four trillion to the debt over the side by side decade, mostly past keeping the George Due west. Bush-league middle-grade revenue enhancement cuts in place.

This is not laboring long and hard to produce a mouse. This is laboring long and hard to produce a piece of paper on which is scribbled: "IOU a mouse."

Calculation injury to insult, the pathetically unproductive 112th Congress slunk out of existence without even holding a Business firm vote on $60 billion in emergency relief funds for communities ravaged by Hurricane Sandy. If our government cannot even provide help and comfort to citizens whose lives have been devastated by natural disaster, what can it exercise?

Nosotros are a nation of optimists, so our reflexive tendency is to believe that the 113th Congress, which convened Thursday, must be better. I suppose information technology might. I fearfulness it might not.

1 tin hope that by forcing House Republicans to abandon their insistence that income-tax rates must never be raised, even for the wealthiest taxpayers, Obama has fabricated a quantum. One can hope the method employed this calendar week — accept Vice President Biden work out a bargain with his erstwhile colleagues in the Senate, then challenge the Firm to take it or exit it — will testify useful in future negotiations that might actually accomplish something, rather than only avert a trumped-up disaster.

But the first large task for the new Congress will exist to avoid yet some other trumped-up disaster.

The slash-and-burn upkeep cuts that would have taken effect Jan. 1 were delayed by but two months. This means we volition soon be going back into sky-is-falling crisis mode — at the aforementioned time equally we're bumping upwards against the federal debt ceiling, which must exist raised to avoid default. So before winter ends, our leaders volition exist at it over again.

Almost anybody, liberal and conservative, agrees that some spending cuts are needed but that they should never be imposed in such a ham-fisted, indiscriminate way; doing so would unnecessarily curtail needed programs, cause groovy hardship and gratuitously impairment the economy. Almost anybody, liberal and conservative, agrees that declining to heighten the debt ceiling — which would mean refusing to pay for spending that Congress has already approved — is unthinkable; such a motion would throw the globe'due south fiscal organization into chaos and potentially cause a global recession.

Everyone knows these things. Everyone knows it'southward time to cease the foolishness and get serious.

Would somebody please tell the clowns?

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Eugene Robinson Eugene Robinson writes a twice-a-week column on politics and culture and hosts a weekly online conversation with readers. In a 3-decade career at The Washington Mail service, Robinson has been city hall reporter, urban center editor, foreign correspondent in Buenos Aires and London, foreign editor, and assistant managing editor in charge of the newspaper's Style section. Follow

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Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/eugene-robinson-our-clown-around-congress/2013/01/03/6fdc0dc0-55d9-11e2-8b9e-dd8773594efc_story.html

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