Next week at this time Americans will have reelected President Obama — or fired him. There will be no shortage of post-mortems and exit-poll analyses, and the palpable anger of roughly half the nation that inevitably will follow — no matter who wins. There will be no inspiration or joyful weeping on either side, no matter who wins, as we all face a crisis the following day, no matter who wins.
The “fiscal cliff,” which combines deep spending cuts to military and domestic programs known as “sequestration” with the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, the payroll tax cut, the Medicare “doc fix” and unemployment insurance, threatens to plunge the economy into a tailspin and cause damage that would take years to undo. It can and must be avoided, but no one yet quite knows how. Despite bipartisan outrage over the state we’re in, most Democrats like our broken entitlement systems the way they are and most Republicans won’t raise taxes even for a 1-10 ratio with spending cuts to help reduce the deficit. The fiscal cliff was created by Congress in the summer of 2011 when both parties raised the debt ceiling with the promise (aka punt) of doing the hard work another day. Nearly one and a half years later the day of reckoning is here, and Congress has just six weeks to solve the thus-far unsolvable. Are you laughing or crying?
