Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:<\/p>\n
The question I\u2019d like to see asked:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
If Congress doesn\u2019t reduce spending to less than or equal to realistic revenues, creditor nations will decline to buy more debt and the President will be forced to decide which checks his administration won\u2019t mail.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
If you were President, which checks would you hold back, and why?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The question is merely a hypothetical today. But if the economy doesn\u2019t recover soon . . . well, military planners run war games all the time, trying to anticipate problems and create solutions before we\u2019re facing disaster with only moments to react in panic. Why not politicians?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Joe Doakes<\/p>\n
Como Park<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
It’s a tough question. \u00a0Tougher still because I’ve been told (haven’t looked it up myself, yet) that we could shut down the entire daily operations of our government – Congress, the SCOTUS, and the entire Executive Branch, including all the Cabinet departments, including Defense and Health and Human Services, and still not attack the deficit; it’s the entitlements. (I need to look that up, obviously).<\/p>\n
All the usual conservative suggestion – shutting down the Department of Education, defund NPR, privatize the National Endowment for the Humanities – aren’t even a whiz in the wind. \u00a0What we need <\/em>is to cut entitlements – Social Security, Medicare\/Medicaid, Obamacare – and cut them radically.<\/p>\n
Which means not just cutting spending, but changing the way this nation looks at retirement and health insurance.<\/p>\n
OK. \u00a0So go to it. \u00a0What do we do?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: The question I\u2019d like to see asked: If Congress doesn\u2019t reduce spending to less than or equal to realistic revenues, creditor nations will decline to buy more debt and the President will be forced to decide which checks his administration won\u2019t mail. If you were President, which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,68,123],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economy-and-the-market","category-capitalism-v-socialism","category-taxes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21591"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21591\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21593,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21591\/revisions\/21593"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}