Quit stalling and start working together.

I am waiting on the Republican Party to understand they did NOT win the election. While they still hold a majority in the house, they actually lost ground there, too. But still no resolve to solve the country’s financial crisis with compromise.  No wonder the President is digging his heels in and being tough.

The other side is obstinate and unyielding.

I give the Speaker credit for restructuring committees and taking Tea Party stalwarts off financial posts and placing more, levelheaded folk in those positions – men who understand that revenue generation will have to happen and that means new taxes.  The followers of Grover Norquist are mistaken and wrong.  And I am even believing they are slightly un-American in their view of the future of this country.

And I also give the Speaker kudos for trying to negotiate with the White House on a path to getting us out of this crisis. But the party behind the Speaker is being just as stupid as they were before the election. America wants a change.  They want all Americans to pay their fair share.  Key word there is FAIR.  One needs only to read Warren Buffett to realize that the rich can afford more — and they get more out of the  infrastructure of the nation that the average citizen.

Arguments have been made on both sides of the question about lower taxes for the wealthy generating more jobs.  We haven’t seen in in the last five years, so it must not be working. It didn’t work under Reagan, Bush I or Bush II. But the right wants to believe that lower taxes for the Daddy Warbucks of America will generate great prosperity for us all.  (Ain’t gonna happen.) Besides the right wants to strip America of the entitlements it has paid into…Social Security and Medicare: both of which need restructuring to be sure, but not wholesale dismantling as some on the far-right would have you believe. We are “entitled to these things, because we have paid for them. They are not freebie handouts to a slothful society. Far from it. They are part of a whole network of payments entrusted to Congress on the behalf of the American Taxpayer, which Congress has squandered away.

But the right would make you think that people wanting the entitlements are a bunch of non-working, freeloaders. Hey, Rush, look at our paychecks and see the withholdings for FICA, et al., and then tell us we are freeloaders. American is made up of hard working men and women who have paid into the system and who expect that system to return to them the funds the entrusted it with.

 The “Cliff” is looming.  If we get there without an accord, the finger can only be pointed in one direction: Toward Congress. It has done little if anything, to show that it is willing to work for America and not for the “causes” that propelled it to the most expensive loss in U.S. electoral history.

Come on Republicans, let’s roll up our sleeves and work out a compromise. We need new and more revenue and we need to cut spending.  We need reform on both sides of the ledger.  Not just one.  But both. 

Give us a solution and the American people with their resilient American spirit will make it work. But remember, not all Americans are country-club, yacht-owning-high-net-worth individuals with tons of cash buried off shore out of sight from the IRS. Some are just hard-working middle class families trying to make a go of it. 

Oh, I forgot, your party walked away from them…haven’t you?