God Bless America .... Pretty Please?

Ok, so I get home from work and (somehow) end up in front of the TV. Except this time I'm not watching some pointless sitcom or something. I watched C-SPAN for two hours. They're talking about the national budget. At the moment I turned it on, there were a few Republican representatives griping about how the Democrats were going to raise taxes. We are to believe that this would be bad, because the money the nation gets from taxes actually goes up when you lower taxes, because people have more money to invest, and to start new companies with, and as a result everyone is better off and can pay more taxes anyway. They proposed instead that taxes should be lowered further, toward the end of prompting more of this same effect.

So the Republicans are done. Now it's the Democrats' turn. It took all of about 5 seconds after the representative set up his little easel and big cardboard diagrams for him to start whining about how President Bush has increased the national debt by a few trillion dollars. He argues, then, that the President has borrowed money from other nations in order to help fund a tax cut for Americans making more than $400,000 every year. That is a nearly exact quotation. So now I'm to believe that, if this representative is speaking accurately, America borrowed $3 trillion and handed it to a bunch of rich Americans. But the fun doesn't stop there! We're not planning to raise taxes, but we are going to lower taxes, says the Democrat. And while we're lowering taxes, we will increase spending on education, veterans, and healthcare. Gee, doesn't this sound familiar? Oh yeah, that's the same promise that President Bush campaigned on in 2004. So it sounds to me like the Democrats are saying that President Bush's budget plan has put the country in a ridiculous and insurmountable amount of debt, and yet they are proposing the very thing he did.

Where can our country go? This is not politics, this is some sad kind of schoolchild playground war. The Elephant gang and the Donkey gang are so blinded by their own superiority that they refuse to see past the shortsightedness of their own team and accept that the other side might have anything valuable to contribute. Ok, so there were several Republicans who got involved in scandals of some sort. Therefore, all Republicans are bad. So there are some Democrats who think taxes and spending should both be increased. Therefore, all Democrats think taxes and spending should be increased. HELLO! It's not rocket sceince! It's BASIC LOGIC! What if our congresspeople would, for once, forget what "side of the aisle" they're on and just look at an issue as no more than it is. A Republican proposition to lower taxes should be treated no differently than a Democrat proposition to lower taxes. And yet, if the Democrats have the majority, the Republican bill will lose simply because it was a Republican who created it. Does no one else see it? Surely, you'd think that if enough regular citizens would speak up on an issue, politicians would have to actually read the Constitution for once and realize that they are supposed to be representing their districts, not representing their party. What I'm seeing is top-down government, not the bottom-up government that was intended. Authority is supposed to come from the people, through the congress, into the laws. But instead it comes from the majority in Congress, into the laws, down to the people. Never mind who started the war, never mind what party that last scandal involved - why can't politicians vote based on the merits of the propositions rather than their affiliations?

Vote for Nader!