1hundredsixty8

Congress is trying real hard to be taken seriously. Today, Rep. Paul Ryan released the House GOP(P)'s budget. Later this week, Senator Patty Murray is scheduled to release the Senate Democrats' budget. There is a striking similarity to these plans in that they both blissfully ignore political and economic realities.

The Ryan budget, as it has in the past, takes square aim at Federal spending, particularly the "social safety-net"  including the outsized Medicare and Medicaid programs. It includes optomistic projections of GDP growth over the next 10 years.  Sen. Murray's plan is said to include a substantial tax increase as well as more spending reductions. Neither of these plans has a snowball's chance in hell of becoming law.

It is easy to mistrust the motivations of Congress, especially in light of the performance of both parties since Barack Obama's election in 2008. The pathetic attempts at redemption  our politicians make in casting their budgetary incantations in the idiom of defictic reduction only serve to delineate the chasm between themselves and we the people they purport to represent. It seems that neither Sen. Murray nor Rep. Ryan, as the point persons for their parties, are prepared to deal with a salient cause of the current economic malaise, unemployment. Once again, we will witness the pitiful spectacle of the doctor attempting to treat the symptoms and not the disease.