You Are Entitled to Call Bullshit! -OR- Do You Even Know When You're Being Played?

From July.

The rut we're in is fascinating. We have John Kyl demanding that Unemployment be offset with other dollar-for-dollar spending cuts, while tax cuts need not be. There's nothing particularly original about this line of thinking. It's a big part of what has put us in our present state of phooked. When we began on this ill-advised, unsustainable, ill-conceived, but methodically implemented rethinking of things, a not insignificant number of folks knew exactly what would happen. Not to belabor the point, but ( since nobody else does?), this is just the continuum of voodoo economics' hostile takeover of this country.

Until that is reconciled, there is nothing to be done except to keep reshuffling the deck. As Crazy Eddie might say, "we're up to our ears in Sacred Cows, everything's gotta go!". That's the gist of the teabag movement, the libs, the dims and the repugnants. So what's the problem? Why can't we seem to make any kind of progress?

As you may have noticed, I'm not big on citing experts or pundits or think tanks or teevee personalities to support/prove my assertions here. You can chalk that up to pure laziness on my part. On the other hand, it might be because I've grown tired of playing dueling links to zero-sum asshats. It shouldn't take a list of ANYTHING to recognize the problem or to see that baby steps won't change a thing when outpaced by the giant strides of inertia.

And there it sat...

It's hard to admit the need for remedial education, the easy path is to keep promoting the problem through the system until it ages out. If the problem has a talent that entertains, or there's a buck to be made by exploiting the problem, or if being a problem is the NORM, or if ignoring the problem is cost-effective, or addressing it is cost-prohibitive, then there is good enough reason to continue ignoring problems. Pretending they will not compound is foolish, but by far the easy way.

The "problems" meanwhile may be deemed unworthy, but they are not blind or stupid. They learn the game, they play their part. Their attempts are often both sad and comical.

All math students learn that you must work the whole problem. You can't pick and choose which parts are "vital" based on your ability to work them. You can solve for unknowns, but you cannot ignore known factors and expect to arrive at anything but an incorrect answer.

It's sad, but necessary, to admit that we've been compounding our problems by ignoring large chunks of the equation. Whether it's unemployment INSURANCE premiums being insufficient to meet its obligations, or Wall Street's greedy drunken binge, or any of the trillion other money tricks that have been devised in the new math of Reaganomics, all have ignored accepted, unavoidable, function signs and proven mathematical laws to arrive at an incorrect "solution".

Are any of the currently proffered answers correctly formed based on ALL of the variables? Yes, it is accepted to work separate elements of a number problem separately, but never to leave stuff out to make it appear that you've solved the problem.

It's called DOING THE MATH and is requisite for coming up with the right answer.