It has become common, if not cliche for people to lament the partisanship in Washington and ask heaven and everything under it why both parties cannot just come together and find common ground. (It is gratifying, after all, for one to cloak themselves in moderation and maturity and to cast poxes on everyone else.)
As lamentable as this cacophony may be, it is the inevitable byproduct of being broke, and we are very broke.
The post-war surpluses that permitted the oft-elegized age of bipartisan comity are gone. In fact, the genesis of our present predicament is that much of that "surplus" was illusory -- it was borrowed. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and every other manner of federal spending were not paid for with surplus revenue but with the national credit card. Under this arrangement Democrats got their government spending and Republicans preserved their (relatively) low tax rates. Everyone was happy, the unsustainability of the equation a problem for another generation.
Alas, that generation is our generation. The Indian Summer of high spending and low taxing has come to an end and reality, along with the tab, has come. We have to pick one path or the other, a choice that brings to the fore the fundamentally different philosophies of both parties.
With such stakes at issue, no wonder consensus is hard to find. Someone must win and someone must lose. Both sides have dug into their respective trenches, hunkered down for a long, earth-scorching, zero-sum battle.
You may not like the disagreement in Washington, but you may as well get used to it.
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