Dysfunctional And Corrupt Is An Understatement

Paul Krugman hits the salient points of the pathetic 'debate' over the fate of the Bush tax cuts in his column this week:

What’s at stake here? According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, making all of the Bush tax cuts permanent, as opposed to following the Obama proposal, would cost the federal government $680 billion in revenue over the next 10 years. For the sake of comparison, it took months of hard negotiations to get Congressional approval for a mere $26 billion in desperately needed aid to state and local governments.

How can this kind of giveaway be justified at a time when politicians claim to care about budget deficits? [...] No, this has nothing to do with sound economic policy. Instead, as I said, it’s about a dysfunctional and corrupt political culture, in which Congress won’t take action to revive the economy, pleads poverty when it comes to protecting the jobs of schoolteachers and firefighters, but declares cost no object when it comes to sparing the already wealthy even the slightest financial inconvenience. So far, the Obama administration is standing firm against this outrage. Let’s hope that it prevails in its fight. Otherwise, it will be hard not to lose all faith in America’s future.

I'm not going to try to add anything to that, because I have already done so previously. It's not about economics, or the wisdom of Nobel laureates - it's about a broken and corrupt political system where ideology prevails over reality, where the media treats both positions equally when one is absolutely full of shit, and where the liars have no incentive to stop lying. A culture where a dime of government spending must be debated for weeks and filibustered for months, but slashing revenues is always a great idea, always the right idea, and always the panacea regardless of the symptom.