I would have preferred we went over
the cliff, and without any fancy smoke and mirrors maneuvering in early January to back-ass our way back up to the edge.
That way the citizen outrage would perhaps compel the fat cats in Washington to address the real foundational problem: in/off- shoring of our jobs to wage-slaves, out/in- sourcing of all types, both legal and illegal.
Scores of millions of American citizens are still greatly suffering in the wake of The Great Recession, 43% according to last summer's figure, with 47 million Americans on food stamps, including a true unemployment rate of around 14% nationally, with demographic pockets of unemployment still as high as 25%!
All this is caused by "The Global Economy" (read: wage-slave workers in a borderless countryless power structure run by comglomerates), whereby third-world poverty is imported to America, and the only way to extricate ourselves from this global nightmare for American citizens is to face the reality of our state of emergency crisis and address it directly.
Now that the Washington fat cats and their lobbyists live to do nothing another year, they won't be motivated to support we the people .. and too many Americans, grown complacent through apathy, will also just breathe a sigh of relief that their taxes only went up 2% (the ending of the two-year-old Social Security Payroll tax reduction), and they'll just hunker down .. and keep struggling .. while the increased income tax on corporations and private citizens with money sufficient to hire simply now won't hire .. and we wait for things to deteriorate.
Because we didn't go over the cliff, we continue to be the frog in the pan of water with the heat slowly being turned up .. and eventually we will be cooked, before we notice.
Had we gone over the cliff, it would be like suddenly turning the fire up to a boil, and then we'd know right away that it was time to do something, like jump out of this foundational mess!
Washington is simply loaded with cowards, both left and right, who continue to sacrifice the livelihoods and the very life-long careers of their constituents, just so they can "look good", they hope, to keep their short-term temporary job.
And all of America inches more dangerously over a nationally deadly precipice.