Would You Meet Your Killer Halfway?
Perhaps it has not occurred to critics like Lazzaro that our real fiscal cliff overlooks the economic consequences Foreman describes. In that context, what does it matter if stock and bond markets plunge in the immediate future? Worrying about tomorrow’s markets while ignoring the consequences of unchecked spending is like refusing to set a broken bone on account of immediate pain, hardly reasonable or prudent.
Foreman’s most critical observation is that higher taxes cannot solve the debt crisis:
According to the White House Office of Management and Budget, if you taxed income over $250,000 you’d raise $56 billion next year and only solve 5 percent of a $1 trillion dollar deficit.
The percentage reassures no more when adjusted for the $400,000 mark agreed to by Congress. So when Tea Party-backed Republicans in the House stand firm against a non-solution like the one just passed, they prove themselves to be the adults in the room.
As the Tea Party continues to engage the culture, confronting blind reverence for compromise will be a necessity. The characterization of the Tea Party as uncompromising is silly in a context where every choice offered by Democrats is a different way to die. That point has to be made aggressively by Tea Party members of Congress as they approach the debt ceiling battle. If President Obama and Senator Reid want compromise, they are going to have to start from the same point of fundamental agreement where Simpson and Bowles are. Spending must be cut. From there, we can negotiate how much.
Of course, that’s unlikely to be how the debate is framed. The self-styled progressives dominating the White House and the Senate know all too well how compromise works. They are masters at crafting contextual narratives in which any deal will default in their favor. In the case of taxes, the preferred tactic is to propose vast tax increases and then “meet Republicans halfway” by offering lower hikes on fewer earners, all leading to an endgame of accusing opponents of “protecting millionaires and billionaires.” Agreeing to public discourse on those terms is agreeing to lose in advance.
Instead, stout-hearted Republicans and their Tea Party supporters need to define the terms of debate. Any proposal absent real spending cuts cannot be taken seriously, and short-range fear-mongering like Lazzaro’s must be answered with sobering facts like Foreman’s. When compromise is eventually reached, let it be in service of fiscal responsibility. Otherwise, what’s the point?
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More on the future of the Tea Party at PJ Lifestyle from Walter Hudson:
Misinterpretation and misapplication of Judeo-Christian tenets
Thank you for noticing this. So much of what is claimed as being done in the name of Jesus is actually contrary to what He would have us do, contrary even to long-established teaching and practice.
We forget there’s no higher moral purpose to statis left/liberals that winning… ’cause “social justice” is SO good for everyone, you see.
Compromise with then is like Neville Chamberlain letting Hitler get the Sudetenland at Munich in ’38 for “Peace in Our Time”… you how that ended.
Their demands are akin to asking you to choose which of your children you would have them kill then criticizing you for being stubborn when you refuse.
When you compromise your principles, you essentially will away your reason to exist.
I’m hoping left/liberals will figure this out verus their islamist allies before our society collapses.
Yes, but there is also a difference between strategy and tactics. Overall, the TEA Party doesn’t seem to know the difference…or even that there are strategies and tactics. Some local TEA Party groups understand the difference, but it is not a general rule nationally.
Standing on a single hill, expending all your ammo and logistics on that single hill -and dying to the last man defending that single hill- when the battlefield and the war zone is vastly larger than a single hill? That’s not a winning strategy.
*yawn*
More babble and hasty generalization from the master.
“Standing on a single hill, expending all your ammo and logistics on that single hill -and dying to the last man defending that single hill- when the battlefield and the war zone is vastly larger than a single hill? That’s not a winning strategy.”
Tell that to Leonidas.
Yes, Warren: we should take a lesson ffrom that Great Compromiser, our Speaker of the House, and show off that political wisdom that won us such great victories in 2006, and in 2008, and again just this year.
And we should never let those horrible no-compromises folks lead us to failure the way they did in 2010.
Right?
Interesting perspective, Hubbub;
But, when you consider the phenomenon of “criminal insanity”, a lot falls into place and makes sense when trying to figure out the Democrat Party and their modus operandi.
“We want to remove your right leg….”
“NO!”
“Then how about your left leg?”
“NO!”
“Your right arm?”
“NO!”
“Your left arm?”
“NO!”
“Why do say NO! to everything?”
It’s simple political give and take.
I take and you give.
See how simple?
I hear that our president said “I get that for free” to our speaker of the house. This, I hear, was when our compromiser in chief offered to raise taxes and asked what the other party was going to give in return. This president seems to think the worker bees will keep producing honey for him to guzzle.
Warren, you make a good point. If we have a goal, we can use the same incrementalism the Left uses, but use it against them. If we have no plan, we have to go for everything at once, which is very difficult.
The trick is to not give in on those things that are indispensable. And the trick to that, is knowing the difference.
so how do you compromise with a person that wants you dead. You get a finger now?
What is the compromise between spending more and more, and taxing more and more, and fiscal responsiblity?
And why is compromise so quickly called good, only when it promotes a liberal agenda?????
Guess it is because the lame stream media if filling the heads of low information voters with mush.
Strange, but when the majority of the country was screaming AGAINST the Obamacare bill, nobody in the mainstream media was calling Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and their minions “obstructionists, intransigent, and obstinate.” What’s also strange is that if conservatives have the temerity to disagree with liberals, we are trying to destroy this nation. And whenever conservatives voice an opinion, we are told to “Shut up and sit down.”
That ends this year. We need to follow the late Andrew Breitbart and take the war to these lowlifes. Defeat them at their own game by attacking them repeatedly in the media, all media, and not just on talk radio. Hit them everywhere and don’t give them an inch.
When the Democrats lost to Bush in 2004, did they all of a sudden want to reach out for bipartisanship? Not on your life. If anything, they re-grouped and came after us with everything they had. And guess what? They not only won in Congress in 2006 but they also got the White House in 2008. And how did that work out for the country? Not well, as we all have seen. Time to man up and take this war to them. A lot is on the line this year, with guns, taxes, spending, and the debt ceiling all right on the table. Time to take the war to them and not give them anything. At least if we fail, we fail by standing for something and NOT standing for a weak compromise that will, in the end, destroy this nation.
And some of the most fashionable brains in the media condemned Rush Limbaugh for reciting an article about pedophilia, and commenting on it.
These F’in idiots think they regulate OUR SPEECH AND LANGUAGE!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/jan/03/paedophilia-bringing-dark-desires-light
The way the administration is going, the nation is going down the drain anyway. Better to stand by our principles. At least we will have gone down free men not debt slaves.
“In any compromise between food and poison, only death wins.” Ayn Rand.
This is also true of dealing with a cheater. Any deal you make with them, you will lose because they have rigged the game to get what they want and leave you holding the bag. Dealing with Democrats, they always get their bigger government and you never get cuts, except in the military and space programs (meaningful things of value which can improve people’s lives which is all why liberals hate them so).
Thane, you are right on with your Ayn Rand quote.
That’s the quote I was going to post.
It clarifies that compromise is not always a good thing,
nor is it a virtue in itself, as others have commented.
Therefore, the Tea Party needs to stand firm on cuts to spending.
The principle that we don’t compromise on is: WE MUST CUT SPENDING.
The terms of any compromise must be: HOW MUCH WILL WE CUT SPENDING?
And not any phony math “we cut the rate of INCREASE of spending”
but real cuts in TOTAL SPENDING.
9 month pregnancies are inconvenient for everyone; mother, child, father, society.
Let’s be civilized and compromise on 4 1/2 months.
It took me so long to log in, I forgot what I was going to say;
OH, wait!!!!
There are senior communities full of fertile women. And under close supervision, the fetus can survive even if they expire prematurely.
And what a factory for future government workers, Congressmen, and every diplomatic U.S. entity!
NATURAL BORN JOURNALISTS, TOO!!!!
Or perhaps 9 women can each be pregnant for one month.
Totally sexist. Currently the woman has to carry the child for 9 months!
Starting in 2014, in the name of equality, men will be required to carry the baby every other month, or for the first 4.5 months of the pregnancy.
Yea; “Boo…”;
ObamaCare is such a gas! At least it spared the men from the last 4 1/2 months. Whew!
Tea Party stands for two plus two equalling four.
Democrats stand for two plus two equalling sixteen trillion.
So, should we just split the difference?
The article title is more appropriate in the ongoing gun control battle. Should we meet our attackers halfway?
I think the analogy of “meeting a killer halfway” is really a good one.
It’s like this: A man confronts you, and declares his intention to kill you and take everything you have.
You protest that you would like to keep both your possessions and your life. In fact, you’d rather he didn’t touch you at all.
A “fair-minded” and “reasonable” bystander is disappointed that you can’t find some kind of middle ground. After all, we all have to compromise on these things, right? So surely it would be most fair all around to just agree that he should simply rape you and take half your money. That’d be a nice halfway point in terms of damage done and each party getting what they want, right?
The best solution is NOT always found in the middle ground between two “extremes.”
I agree it is a good analogy. Another one that I have come up with, but haven’t employed yet, is asking a parent how they would compromise with the registered sex offender who wants to spend time with his or her children. And then when they say they wouldn’t, the correct response is, “why, I thought you were a moderate. I didn’t realize you were such an inflexible extremist!”
There is a heck of a lot of “waste” in the federal government. A lot of this is in the form of duplication of the same tasks that are already done by state government. Then there are things done by the federal government that do nothing but “protect” some group from having to compete in the free market. Agricultural price supports are a good example. We still do have tariffs on some things in order to protect the incomes of certain “special interests”. All of these things raise the cost of living for all of us, including this “tea drinking Libertarian”. If the federal government wasn’t doing these things, obviously far less money would be needed from the taxpayers. Perhaps we actually could “balance the budget”. As an example, the states surrounding the Great Lakes along with Canada have made agreements regarding preserving the Lakes from pollution and the invasion of certain species of fish. It appears that many actions of the federal government really are of little benefit, but serve to increase the cost of living along with creating economic inefficiencies. Obamacare is a good example. It increases costs, will require added taxes, will reduce the standard of living for many Americans, and destroy jobs as employers attempt to avoid the added costs that Obamacare requires of them. Had we really wanted to reduce the cost of health care (we pay almost twice as much as do people on the average living in the rest of the developed world), the introduction of a true free market in health care would have done what was needed. Unfortunately, Obamacare does the exact opposite. We currently are spending an estimated trillion dollars more for health care than is really necessary. That trillion dollars is a good part of our yearly deficit! On my blog (muskegonlibertarian.wordpress.com) I explain what we could do to make health care once again “affordable” instead of the economic burden it has become. Unfortunately the “nanny statists” (aka Democrats) don’t want to allow people to have the freedom to take care of their own health without the involvement of “government” (federal, state, local). Mainly because they do not believe that we are “competent” to take care of ourselves in these matters. So instead they want us to pay large sums of money (that could be put to better use)having unnecessary doctor visits and unnecessary lab tests. Without prescription laws, many of us would be able to take care of our own health without all this added expense. In the eyes of “nanny statists”, we are incompetent to do much of anything and must rely upon the “wisdom” of government!
“Okay, so we’ll both kill ourselves. Together.”
“You go first.”
Democrat idea of compromise:
“We’ll take half now. However, in return, we’ll say ‘pretty please’ before you give us the other half.”
Conservatives need to realize they cannot lose in the debt ceiling debate. There is no long term downside at all to default. Yes, markets would be disrupted for a short period while global savings return to historic stores of (un-diluted) assets, such as gold and precious metals.
In the event that the debt is defaulted, markets would abandon American debt, forcing lawmakers to pass balanced budgets. Entitlements would be reformed in the harshest means possible – lack of funds. The debt problem is solved quickly, albeit painfully.
The BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated settlement) solves the underlying debt/deficit problem. Conservatives should indicate they have no need to compromise at all and that default is a valid path should negotiations break down.
Chainsaw hu?
I’m thinking more like one to the heart.
Anyway; yeah… these things also always have the problem that the other site pulls the football. So we give and they don’t.. which is their game of course… of which saying we are nutty and irrational is part of.
I get so tired of this fetishization of ‘bipartisanship.’ More than once I’ve had otherwise normally sane, sensible people lament how politics have gotten so polarized that ‘nothing can get done.’ Answering “you say that like it’s a bad thing” gratifies my inner snark and makes them go away for awhile, which is the best I can do. I’ve tried patiently and politely explaining that maybe, just possibly, some things /shouldn’t/ be gotten done, but the only result is blank expressions that say I might as well try to teach algebra to a paperweight.
The federal government needs to be cut by two-thirds. But I’d be willing to settle for cutting it by one-third. See? Compromise!
“But if the Tea Party persists in its “No tax increases, ever” intransigence or it otherwise amends the bill with deep spending cuts that would be DOA in the Senate.”
In short, the left will not compromise on spending cuts.
How could anything be “DOA in the Senate”? Surely the Democratic senators will compromise, no?
Doc, only a little antibiotics, please.
I want to meet the bacteria in my blood halfway.
I hear from the left that compromise is really important, at least when they want something they’re having difficulty obtaining it.
I’ve always wondered what the appropriate compromise would have been between the Union and the Confederacy in 1860. The South wanted to keep all their slaves, the North wanted to free all slaves. Would freeing 50% of the slaves have been a perfect compromise?
There were two well-known compromises in American history. Well known enough to be Compromises with a capital ‘C’.
The Three-Fifths Compromise.
The Missouri Compromise.
Next time some liberal asks for compromise, you might want to point that out. And perhaps put in a dig about being for slave-owners, rather than the Republican Abolitionists.
We have compromised for the last 50 years and look what a mess we have. Time to swing the pendulum in the other direction. The left must compromise, compromise, compromise. That’s the part they don’t get. They got their way for so long that now when the conservatives say “no”, they squeal like stuck pigs.
Obama has vastly increased spending in this country in 4 years, to the point that a lot of us think the situation may be unrecoverable.
Are we just supposed to give him anything he wants, no limit, no control? You think we are the unreasonable ones? Are you insane?
This country has been on a one-way spending and government growth ratchet since the 1930s. Always spending goes up, never does it go down. Up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up.
DO WE EVER GET WHAT WE WANT?
D___R___T______________________________________________________N
D = where Democrats stand
R = where Republicans stand
T = where Tea Partiers stand
N = where the nation needs to be to avoid bankruptcy.
Math does not compromise, it just wins every time.
GMTA…
“If I am made to walk the plank by a pirate, it is vain for me to offer, as a common-sense compromise, to walk along the plank for a reasonable distance.”
~G.K. Chesterton in “What’s Wrong With the World”
12. Government debt squeezes business and makes it harder to hire new employees. Government borrowing makes it more difficult for small business to borrow the money they need for expansion… The result: Fewer new employees are being hired.
This ignores the strong presumption by progressives that more government debt will be used to hire more government employees, or ink more government contracts with small businesses that do business with the government. More new government employees are certainly being hired with a lot of this debt.
Whenever you hear calls for “investment” understand that it’s a progressive call to hire more public sector workers, who will vote for more “investment”.
I would pay a bit more attention to these constant calls for compromise if they were equal on both sides. If the MSM started bemoaning the unwillingness of Obama and the dem senate to compromise on spending cuts, their call for compromise on revenues would have a bit more resonance with me.