Season of Chicken Fights

'Tis the season of chicken fights. 'Tis the season that two parties plow towards some mutually destructive doom all the while entirely relying on the other party to be first to give up first succumbing to the first's demands. Why 'tis this the season? No real reason. It's not even an annual occurence really. And yet we, the general public, find ourselves the betting chips of major, battling institutions.

Two instances come most to mind for this season. The first between the NFL and NFL Players Association stand to risk our millions of fans' primary source of entertainment through cold, midwestern falls and winters and ruin Steve-from-Accounting's chance to implete his new, fail-safe strategy for Fantasy Football. The second and significantly more important in theory - allbeit not in practice according to some - is the debate between the Congressional parties to raise the debt ceiling.

The debate is between a radical, unyeilding ideology and a practical application of principles. The Republican party, lead most loudly by the newly popularized Tea Party subsect, has chosen to adhere to one of the most literal and hardlined of its ideologies of slashing spending without raising taxes and does so, to some degree, at the detriment of its core contingencies.

The Grand Old Party has historically been the party of the grand and the old. Now I'm sure the growing uber-rich are much appreciative of Republicans preventing tax rates from returning to levels of the Clinton administration (levels under which our country had a budget surplus), but playing around with the idea of not raising the debt ceiling is serious.
By July of this year country's deficit will exceed the current debt limit. If Congress passes legislation that places the ceiling at a higher amount, we will be fine. If this simple technicality is not carried out, American will official default on its debt, ruining our solvent credit rating, toppling us from our perch of number 1. It would DESTROY our economy, and Wall Street will be pissed. 'The tax breaks were fine, but cut the shit. You're screwing with our livlihood,' some would presumably be thinking.

The main contention of Tea Partiest is that to raise the debt ceiling would be to accept outlandish government spending and everything they fight against. Instead Rep Paul Ryan (WI,R) has proposed a plan that would strip Medicare from the system. What Ryan has forgotten is screwing with Medicare is exactly what Republicans accused Democrats of doing with ObamaCare in order to frighten senior citizens into voting for people like him. In fact as many economist have pointed out that, while the taxpayer would less under Ryan's plan, the average American would actually pay more for health care as private insurance is often priced higher.

Obviously there is a problem with the Medicare system. It was been a dramatically growing portion of our budget over the past couple decades, but we can't throw the baby out with the bathwater. The is a difference is committing to one's principles in adaptation to the world's challenges and adhering to a hardline ideology in an all-or-nothing game.