Stoneage Ramblings

By John R. Stone

Probably the best thing we should be looking for in this year’s election is people who promote balance.

Republicans want to promote business and Democrats will want to promote the rights of labor.

In reality both have to work hand in hand to exist well together.

Businesses create jobs and thus will play a vital role in our form of democracy. We are not socialists where the means of production and distribution are owned and controlled by the state. We are where we are as a leading national economy because businesses are mostly free to invent and grow.

At the same time these businesses need people to do the work and those people need to be treated fairly. That’s why we have minimum wage laws and other worker rights. If people don’t make money, they can’t purchases goods and services.

Good businesses take care of their workers with good pay and benefit packages. But to be able to do that, they first need to be able to make a profit.

So there is a balance there, people want to be paid as much as possible while the business needs to have money for payroll plus money for other expenses and to invest in business growth. No business growth, no growth in payroll.      

Another place we need to be reasonable is taxation. Just about everyone would like to pay fewer dollars in taxes. But right now we aren’t paying the cost of government at the national level, we’re borrowing roughly 30 cents of every dollar that is spent at the Federal level. We can’t do that much longer.

In 2001 the national debt was less than $6 trillion dollars. Since 2001 we have had 12 years of Republican leadership and 12 years of Democratic leadership. The debt has gone up each year under both parties to just under $35 trillion. The last year there was a budget surplus was 2000, President Bill Clinton’s last year.

Since 2000 we’ve had the .com recession, the War on Terror, the financial meltdown of 2008, the pandemic of 2020 to name a few of the reasons people say we’ve needed to spend more than we take in.

And yet every new administration has promoted tax cuts without government expenditure reductions and both the Republican and Democratic candidates have already said they want to do that if elected this fall.

Again, where is the balance there? More spending, more debt, more promises that will end up being paid for by our children and grandchildren.

Everybody needs to pay a fair share of the government’s operation, people and businesses.

What needs to happen is that whomever is elected this November needs to establish a government commission on programs. We need to evaluate every government program and see whether or not it is still meeting its objective and whether or not that objective is worth the dollars spent.

`Businesses do that all the time because they have to. Government should, too.

This is actually the job of Congress. The President submits a budget to Congress which then approves spending guidelines for a budget year. But Congress hasn’t approved a budget in years, it gets to budget time (which is now), takes most of August off, and then when September 30 comes around it hasn’t finished its work so it passes “continuing resolutions” to keep spending at its current level into the next year.

This is where Democrats and Republicans should be working together in honest budgeting but instead they choose to keep the status quo to avoid losing anything. So we all lose as Congress rolls up more debt.

Neither Democrats nor Republicans have all the answers, they need to work together with the best of their ideas from each side to find a balance. We need to insist upon that.