How To Fail Again. Again (Part 2)

Before getting to the main Christmas gift from Congress – extending the Bush/Obama-era tax-cuts, there are still more lessor gifts tucked, shoe-horned, wedged, cobbled, and stuffed under the national tree. Given it's a tax bill, it's not surprising that Congress used their hammer to pound more and more tax cuts/credits/exemptions/deferments into the bill as a compromise to gain support. Now compromise isn't a bad thing, in fact it's an essential ingredient in politics. The structure of our legislature is a compromise, the Constitution is a compromise and the Bill of Rights is a compromise. So the fact that Congress and the Administration compromised in drafting the bill is to be expected, especially since neither the Republicans nor Democrats could get a bill through Congress and signed by the President without some give and take. Whether its a good bill or not is not tied to the compromises that have been made, that question has more to do with the all-or-none nature of the tax-rate extensions, its affordability, and the true worth and impact that it will have to the nation's economy. But that is for the Part 3. Here let's shake all those other boxes chock-full of goodies for those who have been uhh! Is it naughty or nice?

We have an environmental gift for renewable energy development. Good intentions no doubt, but couldn't Congress have thought about how to make it target market conditions that impede the development of renewable energy?

There's a gift from Social Security rates, wage earners will find that the government's hand will leave more behind in their pockets as it withdraws its take this year. While few like the pay-day mugging, is reducing the extraction really going to help address the real problem with Social Security? It's underfunded and proceeding toward yet another crisis, and the solution that's going to help is postpone doing anything about the growing cancer in the system itself. Yeah, now that's leadership!

The stockings are filled with all sorts of credits and incentives: child-care, college, use of mass-transit, hybrid cars, energy efficient products, and economic development support for Gulf Coast states. All things that lots of people like, support and don't want to give up. But all things that either cost money or redistribute wealth. (FYI, redistributing wealth is a given in government and societies; but usually the redistribution, as in this case, is not from the wealthy but to the wealthy.)

The justification of everything is that it will help the economy and will create jobs (or will prevent more jobs from being lost). Sounds good, sounds important, sound critical doesn't it. But do you really believe these politicians? When was the last time that they were right? When was the last time that they did something that people liked and then turned out to help the public, as opposed to when they did something that the public thinks was completely wrong but probably was both necessary and benefited the nation?
Everyone likes getting the presents under the tree at Christmas. But how often do people regret the costs that they have to struggle to pay after Christmas because they went out and bought things that they should have known were extravagant or beyond their mean.