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11/22/2004: "Harvest Time for the Low Hanging Fruit"

The period immediately following an election is a special time for political humor engineers. As Maverick said in Top Gun, “It’s a target rich environment!” This is the time that the lame duck Congress can finally pass the “stinkers.” These are the bills that reinforce the pretensions, inconsistencies, and general dysfunction of their august body. These are the bills they don’t show the light of day in the run-up to the election for fear of giving the other side even more to chew on. This is also the very best time to take any knocks from the public, who are generally sick of politics. And, if you’re going to take knocks, it’s best to take them early, and the lame duck session before the next Congress is the best possible time. Before I get into the current bumper crop of stinkers, though, let me take a moment to count my blessings. This is a mellow time for political bloggers. In the frenzied days before the election, political ads provide a virtually infinite source of material. Then there are the shenanigans from the elections themself, which seem to get more shenan-e with each new spin. Then come the stinkers. It’s like that bountiful period between Thanksgiving and New Years, except it starts months earlier! Anyway, we’ve got some particularly ripe stinkers this year. Frequent readers of this humble site will doubtless have already guessed my favorite. It’s of course the ritual of The Raising of the Federal Debt Ceiling. Since Bush, these have been as steady as tides (that only go up, of course) and as common as barn raisings in Amish country. Here’s the latest limit, in dollars and sense (for the sheer drama of all those zeros): $8,200,000,000,000.00. Considering that there are only 80 million households, that means that the share each household will have of this debt when it inevitably reaches this limit and is raised in the next stinker session is: $102,500. How about we all just front this amount now, thus missing out on the extra interest we’ll have to pay (probably equal to the principal amount) if we let it hang out there?