The People's Choice:Distrust-Collapsing Confidence in Government is Bad News, But There's a Way Out

Wall Street Journal ^ | GERALD F. SEIB

[lbryce]

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid sat in an elegant room in the Capitol on Monday afternoon, knowing that the body he leads was in imminent danger of a partisan meltdown. A bitter dispute was still raging over a seemingly simple task—the confirmation of presidential nominees. The crisis led him to muse about the broader consequences of what sometimes appears to be permanent congressional dysfunction.

"When I ran the first time, the approval rating of Congress was at 45%," said Sen. Reid, who came to Washington from his home state of Nevada three decades ago. "Now it's at 10%. In all the time Gallup has been doing its polling, no institution has ever been recorded at lower than that."

[Venturer]

Impeach Obama.
Get id of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi
Find real Leadership for the Republican Party instead of Harry’s friend Mitch McConnell and the eunuch Boehner.

[zzeeman]

Not too surprising, the WSJ has become the mouthpiece for Big Government Republicanism.

[DanZ]

WSJ’s GERALD F. SEIB is one of the BIGGEST socialist dictator types in the country. Do not forget that the WSJ is two parts. The semi conservative editorial pages and the NYT like rest of the paper.

SEIB editorializes on the second or third page of the WSJ once or twice a week in his regular column. He does NOT report news

[zzeeman]

I haven’t been all that pleased with the editorial page content in recent years either.

[Smokin' Joe]

While there are those of us who have no confidence in it because it spends far too much trying to do far too much, the scary part is that there are those who have little confidence in it because in their minds it does far too little.

[Iron Munro]

"When I ran the first time, the approval rating of Congress was at 45%," said Sen. Reid, who came to Washington from his home state of Nevada three decades ago. "Now it's at 10%.

I think there is a slim chance that if Harry worked at it long enough, even he could figure out the cause and effect connection here.

[Pollster1]

The reelection of Obozo proves that the voting public is already brain dead, and America has almost no chance of recovering. The Marxist media and education system is seeing to that.

The attack on Pearl Harbor did massive damage - avoidable damage - but the war was not over on the morning of December 8, 1941. Obama is far worse, but we've only lost when we give up, and I'm not ready to do that.

[bert]

-——The only way out-——

A better way is purge.

All of neoEuropa, New York and all north and east must be purged from the Union. When they are gone, he rest can be managed

[MulberryDraw]

When Mr. mutable says things like, “government is us”, he gets well, muted.

I didn’t see “government should tell us the truth” on the list of things to fix the problem.

[Spok]

But is a dysfunctional Congress really a bad thing?

[Spok]

I’m sick of hearing about ‘compromise’ and the ‘middle ground’. If you’re trapped in a cave with a ravenous beast, wouldn’t be a compromise just to let it gnaw your limbs off? And how do you know that it would stop there?

[Jabba the Nutt]

The author just focuses on the top in DC. That people have come to distrust Washington because politicians have said something. The People are just potted plants watered by the politicians to produce the result that the politicians want. The People are zero.

[The Duke]

I’m certain that Obama, like Nero, would give his horse a position in the Senate. That is, *if* he was man enough to ride a horse!

[slowhandluke]

1&2 - severe term limits.

I suggest this would leave the Mandarins in charge, the permanent bureaucracy would be making the rules. See the British comedy "Yes Minister" for an example.

It would be better to remove the Civil Service classification from a great number of upper level Federal jobs. Then these would turn over with every administration turnover. Yes, that was the bad old days, but you got to turn out the current thieves for a set of less experienced thieves. And thieves only steal your money. The power-mad desk jockeys in the EPA, FDA, USDA, DofEd all want to steal parts of your freedom, parts of your life.

3. Dissolve the eight thousand pages of tax code, and limit everyone to a plain flat tax....to include industry and the private citizen.

A flat tax won't reduce the tax code much at all.

There is about 1 page in the tax code describing the 5 rates (or whatever small number it is.) The other 7,999 pages are describing what is and is not income.

An earlier response suggested no withholding, just writing annual checks. As an incentive, I think that would greatly tweak the bozos in DC, but I doubt we have that many taxpayers (which are themselves a minority) willing to put themselves into that much annual pain.

There's some reason to believe the 16th Amendment wasn't really passed. Getting rid of that would solve a great many things. But nobody in DC (or at least not enough) wants to start pulling any skeletons out of the closet. Not the ratification of the 16th, not Obozo's birth certificate, not Benghazi, not anything that would upset the various gravy trains.

Going forward, my guess is that the only thing with a chance of passing is the FAIR TAX, but the compromise will be to add it to the income tax, not replace the income tax. Thus the Republicans can claim they fixed things, while at the same time introducing the USA to European/confiscatory levels of taxation.