So, Who's Playing Politics With Our Children's Future?

The opinion below was written by the Editorial Staff of the New York Post.  Two Sisters From The Right are in complete agreement that Americans need to face reality and acknowledge that our country is in serious trouble. 

Carrying on with life and business as usual without becoming involved and informed about what is happening in Washington, is not going to make our economic crisis - the partisanship - the unnecessary overspending -  the waste, and dishonesty that pervades the nation's capital, go away simply because we don't face up to it.   The number of Americans who are unaware of the present debate in Washington is astounding.  

We are been played, but most injurious of all is the game that Washington politicos are playing with the future of young Americans.  It MUST stop!
Two Sisters

A debate America needs


By a 218-210 vote, the House yesterday passed Speaker John Boehner's two- stage plan to raise the federal debt ceiling in return for trillions in mandatory spending cuts.

As expected, the Democratic-controlled Senate then blocked it, 59-41, shifting focus back to President Obama.

The GOP bill approved in the House yesterday was reworked after conservatives rightly deemed an earlier Boehner proposal insufficient.

Those holdouts sparked a lot of rancor, but the debate they forced is one worth having -- and one that must continue at least as long as Washington's spending addiction does.

 

The president went to great pains yesterday to stress that raising the $14.3 trillion debt limit "is not a vote that allows Congress to spend more money. . . . [It] simply gives our country the ability to pay the bills that Congress has already racked up."

Bushwa.

Washington spends more than it takes in -- and that can't continue.

Indeed, it was reported yesterday that the US Treasury now has an operating cash balance of $73.8 billion -- $2.4 billion less than the cash that Apple, the computer giant, has on its books.

The reason is simple: Apple collects more cash than it spends. With Washington, it's the other way around. And increasing Washington's revenues via higher taxes does nothing to rein in spending.

As Charles Gasparino noted in these pages yesterday, the high drama in Washington is part of a debate over the size of government and the future of the American welfare state.

Republicans have made great strides -- most notably, by forcing the Democrats to take tax increases off the table and by sharply increasing the amount the Dems say they're willing to cut, albeit with some accounting sleight-of-hand.

But there's a limit to how far they can go -- given that they control only one-half of a single branch of government.

That said, the GOP is right to hold out for a two-stage plan, rather than the single debt-limit hike that Obama is demanding -- complete with threat of a veto -- in order to push the issue past the 2012 election.

Because Obama's proposal doesn't solve the problem -- it just postpones the reckoning.

So who's playing politics?

The president and the Democrats


Copyright The New York Post - July 30, 2011