"Balanced and Compromised"

           Suppose you were sick and needed a doctor desperately.

Suppose your doctor prescribed a mixture of real curatives and of deadly poison, say penicillin and curare.

Suppose your doctor defended this approach to medicine as both “balanced” and a suitable medical “compromise.”

From such a deadly and incompetent doctor, you doubtless would flee for your life.  One does not “balance” penicillin with curare.  If you do, nothing is “compromised” but your survival. 

As hideous, bizarre, or unimaginable as that medical scenario seems, its political equivalent works itself out around us every day.  I am sorry to say that your doctor’s political cousins live and work in Washington, where they have been for decades.  For anything that ails us, whether it has a political cure or not, they prescribe poison and defend doing so as a “balanced” approach and a suitable “compromise.”  They want to “balance” the curative of deficit reduction with the double curare of higher taxes and greater spending.

It will never do; it never has.

It makes as much sense as hiring a football coach who calls a lot of plays designed to lose ground because he wants a “balanced” offense and wants to “compromise” with the other side.  You wouldn’t accept that nonsense from your football program.  Don’t accept it from your government.

If you refuse to accept nonsense from your government, those who work in that government will denigrate you publically and then banish you to Middle Earth, as if you, and not they, were the denizens of fiction, fable, and myth.

It’s as if a whole nation has gone mad with Rodney Kingism:  “Why can’t we all just get along?”

  We can’t all just get along because truth matters; because wisdom is irreplaceable; and because stupidity has consequences.

All but the most economically benighted among us (i.e., Harvard trained) understand that raising taxes in a time of severe economic hardship is a fool’s prescription.  It’s poison.  It kills.  It sucks away venture capital so that new businesses are not begun and old businesses are not expanded.  It creates a climate of uncertainty and economic oppression such that prudent investors either hold their money in reserve or else send it overseas, where policies are more sensible and predictable, where investment can actually pay off, and where the payoff won’t be confiscated to fund even more “balanced” poisoning.

In other words, sucking blood from the successful by raising their taxes (1) drives up unemployment to ever higher and higher levels; (2) higher unemployment levels create more poor; whom our political witch doctors (3) try to help by sucking even more blood from the successful, which (4) keeps the poor coming back to the witch doctors again and again, generation after generation, which (5) keeps the witch doctors in business and in power.

The political witch doctors and economic blood letters in charge of the federal budget, addicted as they are to their own medicine, cannot help themselves.  They cannot stop.  They habitually prescribe economic poison -- higher taxes -- and they relentlessly apply their tax code leeches to the veins of the successful.  It’s the only prescription they know:  Suck blood from some; turn it into an addictive; give that addictive to others; and keep them coming back for more.

In other words, imagine your horrid fate if your pusher were your doctor.

Of course, not all the political quacks and charlatans operate out of Washington.  We should be so lucky.  But we are not.  The witch doctors, the quacks, and the charlatans live and work here too.  We’ve been going to them for more than 60 years in a row, and they have tried to balance every proposed curative with old poison.  The results are everywhere to be seen.

Call your doctor “Democrat,” and call yourself “Detroit.”

The Flying Wallendas were a balancing act, too.  You might recall what happened to them -- in Detroit.