Bayh decides not to run. Good riddance!

A friend on Facebook was lamenting the decision of Birch Bayh not to run for Senate for a third term. This was my reply.

Bayh makes various claims but has been directly party to votes that further enabled the Great Recession in the first place. His objection to “extremists” in Congress is that many of them don’t want to run a federal deficit at all.

As a point of note, just to keep the federal debt from further expanding, not even pay it off, the United States today would have to run a budget SURPLUS of over 3%. Dr. Albert Bartlett, professor emeritus (now) at the University of Colorado, once said “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” Compounding interest is an exponential function. We are passing through the knee of the curve and the entire system is going to experience upheavals because the entire system has been run on debt since the Great Depression.

Now the bill is coming due, worldwide. And rather than making cuts that make sense, we see hundreds of school teachers being fired from a Rhode Island school that ranked as one of the worst in Rhode Island. Why? Because minor demands were made upon them to raise the graduation rate above 50% and they and their union refused, despite the teachers making more than 3 times the local average annual earnings ($70-$75K vs $22K for private individuals in that town).

That’s a microcosm of the greed that has become ingrained deeply within our national psyche, a part of our expectations of entitlements that may soon be blown completely to smithereens, right down to Social Insecurity itself.

And on the flip side of that coin, you have the blatant fraud, from Wall Street clear to Athens, and every nation in between. The Great Recession is not over and there is no real recovery, and this is going to become increasingly apparent as the year wears on. Bayh is leaving before his votes and his name get correlated to the actions which helped further this Great Recession.