Now bone, that's completely ridiculous, the tea (Taxed Enough Already) party elected rebublicans who pledged not to raise taxes. Nobody cares about the debt limit, they can raise that all the way to the moon without breaking their pledge.
Example of state of CA state salaries. www.madhedgefundtrader.com ; not to mention the massive entitlements and pensions CA state workers also get. It's very common for state workers to "retire" at 50 then start receiving their pension and then also work at another state job through their connections and the union! """""""""""""""""""" Money Down the Drain? Who was the top paid state employee in California last year? The governor? The chief justice of the Supreme Court? How about the leader of the Senate? Nope. It was a prison psychiatrist who took home an eye popping $838,706, most of it in overtime. I love it! The state drives people insane by sending them to jail, then tries to cure them with triple overtime. It is a wealth destruction mechanism that only a government could come up with. These are among the revelations uncovered when state controller, John Chang, listed the salaries of all 256,222 state workers on a government website. Only the names were missing. In fact, over 500 state workers earned more than $250,000 a year, vastly more than they could take in with private sector jobs. At least nine made more than $500,000, the top ten taking in $5.8 million. The data was made public after a huge outcry that followed the disclosure of the salaries of town officials in the small Los Angeles municipality, Bell, which topped $700,000. Those generous paydays resulted in criminal prosecutions. Maybe prosecutors should be casting a wider net? """""""""""
The President is very clever, and is making a move that the republicans will not forget for a long time--- He is handing their asses to them. No matter what happens, the republicans will be rightly responsible. He will win his deal-- If it does not go well, their delays will be pointed to in election time, and if it goes well the president will reap the benefits. My hat to you Barack! Remember folks all this mess came from the republican W. He inherited a surplus, but ended his term with the worst bear market in recent history, if not in all history.
The Republicans have been backed into a corner numerous times, they're backed into another one today, and they're not happy. Wotta buncha rubes. Reid called their bluff today. They're unhappy now because of that, the stupes. They could get out of this with a one-liner raising the debt limit, but then someone might notice they've closed down parts of the air traffic system over their ideological purity, and someone else might notice they've proposed ending Medicare, which got their asses handed to them in an upstate NY district that, I believe, hadn't gone to the Dems since the Civil War. Their governor in Florida has lost most of his support, the one in Wisconsin is lucky he isn't being recalled, and the one in Ohio will never get re-elected. All three will probably swing to the Dems in 2012's Presidential election, solely because of the bottomless idiocy of their governors. They're in trouble, and squealing like stuck pigs.
If the GOP had been serious about reducing spending, and proposed and actual, detailed plan, they could have had a shot at actually winning this thing. But they don't, in fact, want meaningful spending reductions. They just want to talk about it. Obama knew that, and played them very well indeed. And in the process, dug a very very deep hole for the GOP in the next presidential election. Same old same old...
Actually, if any of those thugs in D.C. wanted to do the right thing, a balanced budget amendment and term limits would have been implemented a long time ago.
Only an economic illiterate would think about a balanced budget amendment. The original Constitution only prohibited the states, not the Federal gov't, from issuing currency backed by silver or gold. There was a reason for that. The drafters weren't stupid, unlike some posters on ET.
Both Dems and GOP are doing exactly what voters demand they do - spend OPM on bread and circuses. Which is exactly what is supposed to happen in a democracy. "We" created this mess. Only "we" can fix it. Term limits and BBAs will accomplish nothing.