Your Congress At Work

I don't agree with everything in the piece, but the tone of Democratic Representative Jim Cooper's is refreshing:

Congress is in recess, budget season has come and mostly gone, and one party emerged a clear winner: the Incumbent Party. The economic platform of this 535-strong political caucus is designed to prevent any bad news from reaching voters. Despite their public disputes, both the Democratic and Republican wings of the Incumbent Party adhere to the same fundamental principles:

• Pretend to budget for the next five years while offering instead a one-year political fix. ...

• Nod gravely when America's long-term fiscal problems are mentioned, but argue that today's budgets have almost nothing to do with the unsustainability of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. ...

 • Pledge to protect Social Security and Medicare "trust funds" without hinting that those trust funds do not exist. ...

• Promise Social Security and Medicare benefits that the Social Security actuary says are not even promises, much less vested benefits. ...

 • Shamelessly exempt the federal government from normal Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), making it the only large entity in America -- private or public -- able to flout the rules. ...

• Subsidize employer-sponsored health insurance by offering the biggest federal income tax breaks to the people who need it least: high-wage employees of large companies. ...

 • Never even whisper that Standard & Poor's has projected that by 2012, when the budgets of both wings of the Incumbent Party claim to be producing surpluses, the U.S. Treasury bond will lose its AAA rating.

I, for one, would be so much happier if either party acted like George Costanza in the episode where he decided to do things the opposite way of what George normally would do, and his situation improved.

Read the whole thing in the April 13 issue of The Wall Street Journal.