As all of you know by now, the so-called Super Committee failed to produce the deficit-cutting agreement it was mandate to produce. The Republicans decided to "kick the can down the road," specifically past the 2012 election, when the expect to control both houses of Congress and the White House.
It remains to be seen whether that's a wise bet in political terms. Personally, I think a more convincing case could be made that things will go in the other direction, especially when one considers the quality--or lack thereof--of the available Republican candidates for the Presidency. But, even apart from that, we need to stop playing kick-the-can with our national problems--the national debt, in particular.
Here's another example. I've criticized Crudele for this in the past, since (as he admits) he's pushed the idea before. But using retirement funds to solve the housing crisis, as I've said before, simply begs the question "How will we solve the retirement crisis created by our solution to the housing crisis?"
Aside from letting the Bush tax cuts expire, and getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan, there is only one solution to the housing crisis: a "cramdown," or forcing the banks that knowingly made bad bets to absorb the losses they helped to create. Obama should have done this as soon as he was sworn in. But it's not too late.
We don't need to solve our problems tomorrow. We need to solve them now.
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