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No, It Can’t Be “Just Fixed”

- July 31, 2011

Seth Masket dialogues with Alyssa Milano re: the deficit.  This is Seth:

bq. Here’s why we can’t “just fix it.” There are different ways of fixing it. You could raise taxes. You could cut spending. If you want to raise taxes, you could do it on upper income Americans, or on lower income Americans, or some combination. If you want to cut spending, you could cut the military, social programs, or some combination. There is no one way to fix it. And it turns out that people who want to fix things a certain way tend to group together in parties and elect people to Congress who agree with them. So Congress is filled with people who feel very strongly about doing things a certain way, and others feel very strongly about doing it another way, and their careers depend on them making good on their commitments to the people who elected them. That makes it very hard to quickly reach an agreement. This is the essence of democratic representation.

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.

See also Jon Bernstein.