69th Rant: The 112th Congress and the Fiscal Cliff

Well, 2012 is fast coming to an end in 10 hours and 32 minutes, and there has been NO deal reached on the Fiscal Cliff. That means that the can will be kicked down the road for another three months when the debt ceiling is reached.

If you remember from the beginning of the 112^th Congress there was the matter of the debt ceiling debacle from July to August, 2011, where the Republican-led House of Representatives had brought  Cut, Cap, and Balance to the floor on July 15 (as H.R. 2560; the entire transcript of the debate can be found in the Congressional Record here) and it passed on July 19 with a vote of 234-190 with 8 members not voting. Cut, Cap, and Balance in effect died in the Democrat-led Senate, where Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) called it one of the worst pieces of legislation he had ever seen, and even Barack Obama said he would veto it should it pass the Senate. On July 20, the bill was read twice in the Senate and placed on the Calendar (The entire Senate record can be found in five separate places; S4743-4751, S4751-4779, S4781-4795, S4813-4826a and S4813-4826c) for a vote. The vote to table H.R. 2560 occurred on July 22 and that vote passed with a vote of 51-46 with 3 not voting.

I mention the Cut, Cap, and Balance debate and the debt ceiling debacle as that is how and why we are at this point where we are about to fall off the fiscal cliff. If the Senate had passed Cut, Cap, and Balance I feel that it would have been one step in avoiding the fiscal cliff. Now we are on our way toward that cliff, and as I had mentioned in a prior rant,

there is a cliff symbolizing socialism ahead of us, and this election is a make or break election in which we either have a chance to put the car in Reverse or keep it in Drive. If we keep going the way we are, then as I had mentioned in recent editorials, the country as we know it will cease to exist. We need someone to put a bandaid on the bleeding, and Mitt Romney in my opinion is the one to if not stop the bleeding outright at least stop the bleeding for 4 or even 8 years.

Well, we had failed to put a bandaid on the bleeding of the country November 6, and now we are bleeding to death. In that same rant and also in another rant, I had mentioned the Tytler circle, and those words are ever so true even here once more.

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government.  It can only exist until the voters discover they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury.

"From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising them the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.

"The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.  These nations have progressed through this sequence:

"From bondage to spiritual faith;
from spiritual faith to great courage;
from courage to liberty;
from liberty to abundance;
from abundance to selfishness;
from selfishness to apathy;
from apathy to dependence;
from dependency back again into bondage."

I had said that we are in the selfishness to apathy or apathy to dependence stage. After looking at this debate and debacle over the fiscal cliff, I would say that we are fully in the apathy to dependence stage. Right now Atlas is totally shrugging, and there is nothing that can be done to stop him, even if Obama and Congress comes to a deal because it is the final countdown. As Robert Stacy McCain of The Other McCain said on December 10, “It’s either (a) a hopeless stalemate, or (b) the prelude to a total GOP surrender, and there not really anything you or I can do about it.”

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