Both parties play it. Neither really wants to stop.
Think about it. The Federal Government takes in an obscene amount of revenue. An incalculable fortune under any standard. It finds endlessly creative ways to waste and lose money at every turn while never fully meeting any of it's objectives.
It's easy to believe that it's about entrenched bureaucracy or creeping socialism on one hand, or a military industrial complex run amok on the other, but it's much simpler than that. The truth is, both sides simply want to run a deficit. That is the objective. Everything else is misdirection.
That constituencies have grown up around this orgy of wasteful spending is useful, but still tangential to the purpose.
Every two years the parties come before us, in the fierce urgency of crisis, with one side warning that benefits will be cut, while the other warns that taxes will be raised and everyone voluntarily lines up to grant power to one or the other.
Someone once joked that lawyers were the only people that charged by the hour to protect their client from other members of their profession.
Is there any other sane objective that would explain the inability of either side to exert a modicum of fiscal discipline even as we are looking into the abyss?
It is the lawyer joke on steroids, played for the highest stakes possible.
Sadly, neither side seems smart enough to understand that the game is killing the client. They are both too afraid to blink first and give the other an advantage. They think there is still time to jump out before the cliff and they are counting on the other to give up first.
We can blame them for being evil and power-hungry, but really it is just an inability to back away from the greatest racket ever conceived. It is a lack of imagination, or a sense of deep denial, that prevents them from believing that the game will ever have to end.
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