As you probably know by now, our own Eric Cantor couldn’t muster the will to cut the full $100 billion from the budget he and other Republicans promised during the 2010 campaign. While this is disappointing, it’s certainly not unexpected and highlights just how much work we have left to do. Because even if he and they had actually cut that $100 billion … so what? With a $14 trillion debt, $112 trillion in unfunded liabilities, and massive deficits projected by even Obama’s Fantasyland calculations for the next ten years, $100 billion does virtually nothing to address the overall budgetary black hole that’s sucking our nation in faster every day. And soon we’ll reach a point where we won’t be able to free ourselves from the pull – if we’re not there already.
Democrats are now fighting Republicans over the paltry $61 billion in cuts they found the courage to commit to. If the parties don’t together pass a resolution soon to continue temporarily funding the government, it will shut down. Which brings us to the second feel-bad, unsurprising item of this post, also related to Rep. Cantor:
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, a Virginia Republican, made his own push for bipartisan talks.
“A government shutdown is not an acceptable outcome, and I call upon Leader Reid to commit to a good-faith effort to work with us and take that threat off the table,” Cantor said in a statement.
In other words, Republicans aren’t even committed to holding firm on the irrelevant $61 billion in cuts they proposed. If they can’t stomach even this proverbial drop in the bucket, how can we ever count on them to drain the ocean of debt our nation is drowning in?
Like I said, we have a TON of work to do.
