A deal or a solution:

Thursday – July 28, 2011:

A deal or a solution:

Webster’s defines the word deal as: Part or Portion, to distribute playing cards to players in a game. To sell or distribute something as a business. To take action with regard to someone or something. An arrangement for mutual advantage. To engage in bargaining. In Britain, a deal is a board of fir or yellow pine lumber nine inches or wider and three, four or five inches thick.

So be careful who you use the word deal in front of.

The word solution is defined as: an action or process of solving a problem. An answer to a problem. A set of values of the variables that satisfies an equation.

These are two distinctly different words that seem to make their way through our lives depending on what we desire in any given conflict. We make a deal when we buy a car or a house. We come up with a solution when our expenses are more than we take in. We come up with a solution when we can’t afford to pay the electric bill, because we spent the money for that new jacket. I think you know where I am going with this.

It dawned on me today that in Washington the word deal is used a lot. The president wants a debt deal by August 2nd. The Speaker won’t make a debt deal until 3 trillion dollars are cut from the budget. Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, says the deal that the Speaker wants is DOA in the Senate. The word balanced budget is only being kept alive by the members of the Tea Party in the Republican caucus.

Do you see the confusion in all of this? In the meantime the citizens, the tax payer in this case, will have to take what ever is decided in the back rooms as the best deal that could be made. The best deal is seldom the solution especially when the people we elect give us a 14 trillion dollar deficit and we still will borrow 9 trillion more over the next decade. This is no solution, but it’s a deal when we can borrow more on the credit card.

The part of the solution to the deficit problem is, as I wrote about two weeks ago, is the base line budgeting approach that was put into place in 1974. The baseline approach gives a constant number every budget year. It guarantees a sum of money that is tied to the debt ceiling increases that allows us to borrow more. If this base line approach is not there then we can start at zero dollars each budget year and work up the numbers that we need to satisfy a balanced budget. In other words, apply the same accounting principles that a company has to do to establish their budget to operate the business with.

Though this sounds simplistic it does work. It dawned on me today that this magic date of August the 2nd, the day of financial Armageddon that the president has been talking about, might be moved back by three weeks, because there was an unexpected tax windfall of funds coming into the treasury from taxes. I wrote two weeks ago that the government doesn’t really know how much money is coming in and what the expenses really are. It’s a floating number on any given day.

When the president said that unemployment would go no higher than 8%, if his stimulus package went through, we believed him. Trillions of dollars later it’s at 9.2% and growing, because the economy is now shrinking again. When the president gave the military the order to bomb Libya the president said it would be days, not weeks, to oust Qadaffi. It has now been months and the Libyan leader is still there. When the president said it would be Armageddon, if we didn’t have a resolve to the debt deal, we are now again finding out another story. Part of the solution that we do not insist on is being told the truth. I believe that Congressman Ryan, who put together the original and only budget proposal, was the only one telling the truth and who was demonized in the process.

The solution to revamp the government policy on spending and to reform all entitlements is not to deal, but to initiate an action or a process of solving the problem. The solution is to eliminate discretionary spending and put a freeze on earmarks is to eliminate dealing and forget about mutual advantages and stop the bargaining process. The solution is to pay the debt and don’t borrow in the process. The solution to all of this is to establish a set of values to identify the variables that satisfies an equation to solve the debt.

Our form of government works with compromise, but I fear the days of compromise are over. We must find the solutions that will enable the great people in the future who serve to once again do the people’s work. We must insist on truthfulness and trust and when a deal is struck it must be one that satisfies a solution rather than who got the best deal.

I usually quote a founding father, but today I am quoting President Calvin Coolidge. In a remark to Stanley King in 1930 he said: “If our institutions and our cities and states and nation only spent the money they had in hand, we wouldn’t be in the mess we are in today.” It’s a funny thing a few politician’s are saying this today. I think they call themselves the Tea Party.

Gregory C. Dildilian
Founder and Executive Director
Pinecone Conservatives

A footnote: I pick the word solution and not the deal. With a deal you cannot be assured you will get the best deal, if you can’t do it yourself. This is also the solution, because we cannot trust government to make the best deal, especially when a date is picked for our financial Armageddon.