Some are deficit hawks and truly believe we should have a sane, balanced budget. Others claim to be deficit hawks but upon closer inspection, you realize their feathers are different. They aren’t hawks at all. They are deficit peacocks who love to strut and preen but do very little to address the real problems facing America today.
Go read this article to learn how to identify deficit peacocks and why our solving our Federal budget gaps is a much, much harder problem to solve than the peacocks like to admit.
Full link: http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2010/01/deficit_peacock.html
Colorado Springs is dying. Dramatic budget gaps and an electorate unwilling (and politicians unable) to consider tax increases force the city to cut crucial services across the board. There are fewer cops, fewer firefighters, no recreation centers, all museums are closing, no public pools, no one to mow the lawns in the park, and no trash cans in the park at all because there will be no one to empty them. Visitors are encouraged to take their trash with them.
Voters in Colorado Springs decried “big government spending” and emphatically voted against raising taxes to fill budget gaps. Why? Because voters did not “trust city government to wisely spend a general tax increase and don’t believe the current cuts are the only way to balance a budget.”
The result is a general deadening of the city.
The very citizens who voted against tax increases complained that “cuts to bus services, drug enforcement and treatment and job development are attacks on basic needs for the working class.”
Today, as always, we want all the services big government provides but we are unwilling to pay for any of it.
Ronald Reagan raised taxes. His deficits were unsustainable. The Tea Partiers will one day see the light. Until then, we’ll get “small government” and complain about the death of public services.