The 'Balanced Approach' Is An Unbalanced Lie

As the Republicans in Congress struggle to find relevance in a world that ignores sanity, those of us who yet retain a grasp on our faculties must be careful to not lose our way. While we are understandably stunned by the grasping nature of so many of our countrymen who voted for fantasy over future, the fact remains that this ship carries us all, and absent our involvement, said ship will founder on the shoals of ignorance, sooner rather than later.

The first battle in the coming war will be fought over the “fiscal cliff,” which is a dramatic way of describing the agreement Congress and the president struck in order to avoid the last iteration of the bill-collectors’ arrival at our national door. Should both sides be unable to live up to the promises they made the last time, then a pre-determined set of spending cuts and tax increases are slated to become law.

Whether you accept the economic danger our nation faces should we step off the edge of this rhetorical precipice, the fact remains: we aren’t arguing on an equal footing. The terms of the debate are predicated on a fundamental lie. The terms generally understood to mean one thing by the citizen make for something entirely different to the politician.

One such term is “spending cut.” Clearly, we citizens would assume this to be a reduction in dollars spent this year, relative to dollars spent last year. That is not the case. In Washington, they use a wondrous accounting method known as “baseline” budgeting. The money spent in the previous year becomes the baseline for the next year, and so on.

continue at American Thinker: