I'LL RAISE YOUR TAXES IF YOU'LL CUT MY BENEFITS.

Who's right? Should we cut taxes and cut government spending and thereby lower our debt? Or should we raise taxes and increase government spending thereby lowering our debt? Actually neither plan works, period. David Leonhardt says in the N.Y.Times today that we'd have to come up with 7% to 10% of Gross Domestic Product per year to begin to pay down the debt. That would come to about $1 trillion. Just to give you some idea of what we're talking about, if you took the total budgets of Homeland Security, the Departments of State, Education, Energy, Justice, Labor, Transportation and Veteran's Affairs, you'd still be short a mere $400 billion. The point is that cutting taxes and lowering spending or raising taxes and increasing spending only keep you where you are. What's needed is to raise taxes, and cut out subsidies for all sorts of special interest industries as well as corporate and personal tax loopholes, and cut out wasteful military and other departmental programs and cut back on individual benefits. In other words, we need to do some of both plans and a lot more. So the Republicans won't like the idea of tax increases and the Democrats won't like the idea of cutting benefits. Sounds perfect. Of course it's easy for you and I to blame the politicians. Heck, it's fun to blame them. The thing is, it's really our fault, not the politicians. We wanted everything they gave us, but we don't like paying for it. And whenever a politician tries to do the right thing, he, or she, gets voted out of office. We Americans like our cake and we like to eat it too. So if you look at the face of our financial enemy, IT ARE US. So we need to stop our whining about higher taxes, and if your favorite tax deduction goes away, well, just buck up and suck it up. And if it's a little harder to get on the government dole, well just buck up and, oh you know the drill. Or we can always keep complaining about the politicians. After all, they do deserve it, somewhat.