We’re a newspaper, obliged to create a product every seven days, like clockwork.
So we know what a deadline is.
We’ve been to Jerusalem – to Jewish and Arab markets alike, to the legendary shuk.
So we know what bargaining is.
And we’re Coloradoans, fond of going up to our rugged and lovely Rocky Mountains on a fairly frequent basis.
So we know what a cliff is.
Based upon all of these things that we know – not to mention that as American taxpayers we also know what a tax hike is — we think it’s about time for those in Washington haggling over ways to avoid our economy falling headlong over that legislative phenomenon known as the “fiscal cliff” to do precisely that.
If indeed we do plunge over that cliff in about 10 days — due to the inability of those influential Washingtonians to act as reasonable, thinking human beings – not only will just about everybody’s tax bill go up by several thousand dollars, our collective economy is likely to charge straight backwards, reversing itself back into the not-quite-yet-over Great Recession.
What’s keeping the administration and the House of Representatives from reaching a deal? In short, that is to say, over and above the complex details of what budget cuts are to be made and who is going to be taxed at what rate, the primary villains seem to be pride, politics and ideology.
Nobody wants to blink first. Nobody wants to poke, leave alone gore, their respective sacred cows. Nobody wants to be accused of forsaking their beloved political ideology.
In essence, nobody wants to get real.
It is our humble suggestion that both President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner might try blinking at the same moment; that they should give serious reconsideration to the so-called sacredness of their respective cows; that their allegiance to their ideologies ought to take an immediate back seat to their allegiance to the American people.
In other words, get over yourselves and make a deal already.
And make it now.
The clock is ticking. It’s almost midnight. And the cliff greedily awaits us all.
Copyright © 2012 by the Intermountain Jewish News
