"Just a little bit more.” The quote is from President Barack Obama calling for increasing taxes on the rich in America by about 4 percent.
In our view, the problems in the American economy call for much more than “just a little bit” of anything. We need instead a lot of many things.
Actually the insatiable demand from the American people for a lot of everything from the federal government is at the root of our economic plight today. For a long time now Americans have demanded a lot, $16 trillion worth that the government has yet be to be able to afford.
The president has also said that we must “reduce our deficits, responsibly.” That sounds like a good idea. We should responsibly get control of spending more than the government collects. You can either cut spending a lot, raise taxes a lot or do both at the same time, but not by just a “little bit.”
When problems are huge, doing just a little bit never resolves the problem or it takes decades to even begin to make a dent in the problem.
This country did not just suddenly leap into this problem of debt and deficits. We have been moving in that direction, slowly and then accelerating the pace to the “fiscal cliff” since 2001. And no, just our two wars since that date were not the sole reason for our economic problems today. We have seen “bubbles” unrelated to war bursting in our midst for a decade now.
Housing bubbles, dot-com bubbles, Wall Street and derivative bubbles, banking bubbles, European bubbles and for sure the international bubble called the Arab Spring have been exploding in our faces for a long time now.
As Lawrence Welk once said, “Would someone please turn off the bubble machine?” Congress, which promotes many of those bubbles and fails to pay for them, should take that into consideration.
Opinion
Our View: A lot of many things
- Opinion
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Other Views: Still inspiring
Cutbacks in the military budget and the still-recovering economy mean this Memorial Day weekend will go down as a relatively subdued affair — relative, that is, to our usual end-of-school, official-start-of-summer blowout.
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Our View: Setting standard
The sight of hundreds of young student volunteers walking across Moore’s Fourth Street interstate overpass had to be uplifting to the city’s tornado victims.
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Our View: Safer schools
Being able to see for ourselves what would have happened to our children had they been standing in the main hall of their schools during the May 22, 2011, tornado had a profound effect on our understanding of safe schools.
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Marilyn Beasley, guest columnist: Claiming responsibility for abuse of power
Over the past few months we’ve witnessed the abuse of power by President Barack Obama and his administration.
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Our View: ‘Why?’ has no answer
Just hours before, there was breakfast and laughter. There were pictures on the walls and memories in every room.
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Our View: Absent from House
We can’t figure out why two Missouri legislators think they should be elected to the U.S. House when it appears they can’t seem to show up to take care of business in the Missouri House.
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Your View: Terrible injustice
I see this Jasper County nuisance law as a terrible injustice on the rights of the residents of Jasper County.
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Your View: Should we be outraged?
Were there effusive apologies following the lockdown of Boston as most of the continent indulged vicariously in the ongoing manhunt?
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Your View: Terrorism is terrorism
In the May 13 issue of The Joplin Globe there was an Associated Press article concerning the New Orleans shooting.
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Phill Brooks, columnist: Missouri Senate did what Founding Fathers had in mind
George Washington once described the Senate as being like a saucer in which you pour coffee or tea.
- More Opinion Headlines
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Other Views: Still inspiring
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