As much as I like TED Talks, I think I’ll skip blogging about it this weekend since the subject is near death experiences, and that seems a bit morbid. I may look at a couple of them later on, but I’m not likely to blog about it.
I’d like to talk about this Fiscal Cliff thing or, as I see it, Y2K2. First of all, the name. There’s that whole death thing again. You go over a cliff, you die. That’s the metaphor. So, it leads to some inflammatory rhetoric, but, like Y2K, the predicted cataclysmic immediate effects are not actually likely to occur. Nobody’s going to die.
If the Mayans were right, it won’t matter anyway
What it is, as close as I understand it, is this:* If congress hasn’t done something drastic between now and December 31st, certain things go into effect- higher taxes on any income group that’s high enough to be paying taxes, for one. It does mean rich people’s taxes go up, but a lot of other people’s do, too. Also, some loopholes get closed. Also, there are some automatic spending cuts.
It’s not going to be the end of the world. Planes are not going to fall down out of the sky. Hospitals are not going to be plunged into darkness.
What’s more, it’s going to happen, because I certainly don’t expect Congress to do anything in that time. They’re so divided, they couldn’t come together if their lives really did depend on it – and they don’t.
In fact, it’s pretty much as good of a solution as they could have come up with after 6 months or a year wrangling and posturing over who’s killing grandma, so it’s just as well it’s happening now, and they can get on with the process of blaming each other for it.
Don’t panic. It’s not really a cliff.
(*disclaimer: I don’t really have a dog in this fight. Haven’t lived in the U.S. for years so a change in U.S. taxes doesn’t affect me personally)
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