While flipping through radio stations the other night, I happened upon the Dave Ramsey show. Perhaps there is a certain cruel intention, “geez, thought I had a bad day, this persons life stinks, now I feel better” type of mentality. Much like what my wife gains from watching Real Housewives of New York.

The stories are tragic and all end the same way. Dave Ramsey talks low and tells the folks the bad news. There is no money and you have to change your ways.

How wonderful it must have been to be a politician when times were good. A new program here, a pet project there. Just like people who overextended themselves on mortgages and credit card debt, there was no reason to believe that the good times would end. Spend away and kick the problem of paying for a program down the road. If the people want cake, let them eat cake…

Rather than real solutions, political parties dig in. Democrats won’t let anyone touch Social Security, Medicare, and social programs. Republicans resist raising taxes.

If we want to get us out of this mess, both sides have to go Purple.

Dave Ramsey doesn’t tell people what they want to hear. He tells them what they need to hear. We all know changes have to be made to entitlements. The solutions are fairly straight forward. It takes leadership to say it though and paint the picture, regardless of reelection. Americans are willing to sacrifice, but we have to have faith in our leaders that increased taxes won’t be used on pet projects, or a never-ending program that is used to garner votes of a niche group or lobby.

If compound interest is a miracle then compound debt is a plague. Currently, interest on debt by the US is 160 million dollars a day! How much could one day of paying off China do for your local school district, or a week’s worth do for alternative energy to retrofit public buildings, or build a high speed rail.

How many people do you know that have large debt and just pay the interest? The average American has over 15k in debt. To get it paid off requires cutting back on everything. You sell off some assets, maybe not go out as much, take on a second job. You got into this mess, now it’s time to hike up the boot straps and make changes. Or you can just expect the government to “do something…”

I had a purple conversation with a Democratic friend about one current issue. Extended unemployment benefits. First we are told that discretionary spending is frozen and PAYGO is the policy. Except when it’s not. My suggestion was simple. Budgets are being crushed at schools, communities, and government programs. Provide extended benefits to folks that agree to give 5 hours per week while collecting unemployment to help in the community.

Sometimes when folks are in a slump the best they can do is shorten up and bunt. 5 hours a week is a great way to make contact again. Enrich our hurting communities. Reinvent themselves. Show their kids what the “greatest generation” did, that they won’t take unemployment sitting down. If 5 hours is unreasonable, then how is it reasonable to have others pay into a system so that you can do nothing?

It’s this type of tough love/ tough choices that people have to make.

How do we expect politicians to change their behavior until citizens change theirs?

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Andrew is married and a father of two daughters. Owner of Wilcox and Hackett, LLC a legal recruiting and client development consulting firm. A conservative who likes healthy debate. Enjoys reading, writing, working out, sports, and BBQ cooking.

Photo credit: Richard Cox

We do not have to choose between markets that are unfettered against even modest protections against crisis or markets that are stymied by onerous rules that suppress enterprise and innovation. That is a false choice.

We need no more proof than the crisis we’ve just been through. You see, there has always been a tension between the desire for markets to function without any interference and the absolute necessity for rules to prevent markets from falling out of kilter. But managing that tension – one that we’ve debated since the founding of this nation – is what has allowed our country to keep up with a changing world. For in taking up this debate, in figuring out how apply well-worn principles with each new age, we insure that we don’t tip too far one way or the other. That our democracy remains as dynamic, and our economy, remains as dynamic as it has in the past.

So, yes, this debate can be contentious and it can be heated, but in the end it serves only to make our country stronger. It has allowed us to adapt and to thrive.

Bill Moyers on yesterday’s Bill Moyers Journal offers up some advice (you can watch a video clip of the same content here):

With all due respect, we can only wish those tea party activists who gathered this week were not so single-minded about just who’s responsible for their troubles, real and imagined. They’re up in arms, so to speak, against big government, especially the Obama administration.

But if they thought this through, they’d be joining forces with other grassroots Americans who will soon be demonstrating in Washington and elsewhere against high finance, taking on Wall Street and the country’s biggest banks.

The original Tea Party, remember, wasn’t directed just against the British redcoats. Colonial patriots also took aim at the East India Company. That was the joint-stock enterprise originally chartered by the first Queen Elizabeth. Over the years, the government granted them special rights and privileges, which the owners turned into a monopoly over trade, including tea.

It may seem a stretch from tea to credit default swaps, but the principle is the same: when enormous private wealth goes unchecked, regular folks get hurt – badly. That’s what happened in 2008 when the monied interests led us up the garden path to the great collapse.

Suppose the Tea Party folk had dropped by those Senate hearings this week looking into the failure of Washington Mutual. That’s the bank that went belly up during the meltdown in September 2008. It was the largest such failure in American history.

(Photo credit.)

On tax day we took our politically diverse Teen Square meeting on a road trip – a few city blocks down the road anyway – to the Tallahassee tea party “We the People” event. We asked this group of every flavor of political orientation and demographic to take a Rorschach test of sorts: What did they see when they looked at the tea party and how might they have seen something different had they brought with them a different set of political opinions to see it through?

We looked for the wholesome family-oriented tea party. We looked for the kooky, angry tea party.

Of course, as you would with any large group of people, we found them both.

Pre-Village-Square, the chance that I would attend a tea party was near zero. I am offended by the characterizations of President Obama. While I relate to fiscal conservatism, I think too many tea partiers have long ago left planet earth in their assessment of our president’s bio and motivations.

But texture disappears in looking at anything from afar while it is immediately apparent when you take a closer look. Had I gone to the event to confirm my bias, it would have been a stretch. This tea party on this day seemed conscious of how they looked to the outside observer, the mood was more picnic than fury, the signs communicated a perspective far more than they offended and even the opinion was more diverse than you’d expect.

Agree or disagree with the politics of the tea party, you have to give it to them on at least one point: It’s hard to argue that we don’t have a national fiscal crisis.

I was approached with literature for a city commission candidate running against a friend of mine. He told me his candidate was giving the liars on the commission hell. I told him that he wasn’t correct that his candidate was running against someone I personally know is honest and honorable. The man sincerely apologized. I hope he at least considered our conversation as he approached the next group of voters. These are the conversations that never happen when we spin entirely in our own ideological circles.

I caught Fox News discussions touting new polling indicating that tea party supporters are, on the average wealthier and more well-educated than the average American.

Then I flipped the channel to MSNBC to hear Lawrence O’Donnell (Keith Olbermann’s stand-in) describe the very same poll:

“A remarkable poll gives us a solid picture of just who the tea party movement is. They are older, they are whiter than America. They earned more money and are better educated. That’s right, they’re the elite, well-off intellectuals of sorts who are out of step with the real America and they are very deeply confused.”

So the national food fight continues, the twisting and contorting of complexity to fit this or that predetermined black and white version of reality. I have a hard time envisioning how this will end in a way that doesn’t truly damage the country we all claim to love. If “We the People” continue to lap it up, maybe we deserve what we get.

As for me, I’m going to keep taking road trips.

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“In 1979 Paul Volker was appointed Chairman of the Federal Reserve and he began to raise interest rates to crush inflation. It succeeded. And it had a follow-on affect around the world ushering in an era of low inflation, low interest rates and strong growth. What impresses me most about Volker was his willingness to do something that was deeply unpopular at the time in the short term for the long term good of the country. What he did then is now widely praised, but at the time he was burned in effigy as a job destroyer.

If you think about just about every problem we face in the United States, and in fact in Europe, Japan and every advanced industrial country, the solutions are readily identifiable. But they all involve trimming benefits, restricting credit, raising retirement age, trimming pensions and of course raising taxes. The effect of these reforms would be to place the country on much stronger economic foundation, but that benefit comes slowly over time while the costs are sharply felt now and by powerful special interests.

That’s why no one will propose any serious cuts in spending or any serious increases in taxation. Much easier to give everyone what they want and solve the problem by borrowing, borrowing, and more borrowing. So the core problem facing rich democracies these days is they can’t impose any short-term pain for long-term gain. And if we can’t find the the courage to do it, it is very difficult to be optimistic about the future for these countries, including the United States.”

The thing about the political “base” of both parties is that they are much more in love with rhetoric and litmus tests than results. Ronald Reagan didn’t reduce the federal budget, and Jeb Bush didn’t reduce Florida’s budget, but they talked a great game and remain conservative heroes. Conservatives love to pass “sunset laws” and “balanced budget amendments” and everything else, but they rarely declare their opposition to any consequential program and successfully turn that position into policy. Liberals have their own philosophical litmus tests, around race and social programs, for example, but are often unable to manage what we already have.