The breakup of budget talks designed to attract enough votes in Congress to raise the debt ceiling is another depressing sign that neither political party really gets it when it comes to stemming the flow of red ink.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor withdrew from the negotiations, which are being led by Vice President Joe Biden, because he said, “Democrats continue to insist that any deal must include tax increases.” Well, of course they do. Any significant bipartisan deficit-reduction plan will inevitably include additional revenue — although we’d prefer the money be raised by closing loopholes and exemptions, not by raising tax rates as the president insists.
Yet Democrats’ seriousness about meaningful spending restraint is also in question. They’re currently pushing for a package of $2 trillion in spending cuts and tax hikes over 10 years, when that isn’t nearly sufficient. The U.S. is running trillion-dollar annual deficits, and just this week the Congressional Budget Office forecast, according to The Hill, that public debt will surge “to nearly twice the economy’s size by 2035” on the present course.
That’s a formula for disaster — as is the repeated inability of Congress to come to grips with it.
Jobs that American kids should be doing. Yes, there really are jobs in this country that Americans won’t take — but do they include summer employment in national parks? Surely not, especially when unemployment for young people between 16 and 24 is hovering near 20 percent. Hence our dismay to learn, thanks to the recent reporting of The Post’s Nancy Lofholm, that hundreds of foreign students have been hired by park concessionaires under what’s known as the J-1 visa program. In Colorado, nearly 5,000 workers at a variety of businesses hold J-1 visas. Colorado Sen. Mark Udall says he’s “concerned” about some of these jobs going to non-Americans, and well he should be.
Goodbye to a great journalist.Gil Spencer’s farewell column for this newspaper was as brash, free-wheeling, self-deprecating and fun as most of the others that preceded it during his years as editor. “I’m sitting here with this beat-up old typewriter and my pictures of DiMaggio and Sunday Silence,” he wrote. “I started writing this column in May of 1990. This is the last one. My three readers will have a fit.” Spencer’s death Friday in New York City deprives us all of an immense and good-hearted talent.
Short Takes is compiled by Denver Post editorial writers and expresses the view of the editorial board.
