Kabuki Theater.

A few days before the contrived "debt limit" deadline, and D.C. power brokers appear to have come to an agreement to again raise the debt limit so that they can keep spending ... and spending ... and spending. Everyone in D.C benefits—politicians who can buy votes among certain of their constituents, lobbyists who shape the budget and make millions from clients that benefit from government expenditures, federal bureaucracies that now pull in salaries and benefits that dwarf those in the private sector, and the "activist" class who never encountered a problem (e.g., homelessness) that couldn't be solved by throwing still more dollars at it. 

The losers? The continually shrinking number of taxpayers who are asked to use their "fair share" to fund this travesty.

Oh, sure. GOP politicians say the right things about reducing expenditures, but in reality they can't or won't follow through. The Democrats want centralized government to grow without bound, knowing that the more voters depend on federal largess, the more votes the Dems get.

Waste and abuse grow in direct proportion to expenditures, and worse, there is little real incentive to uncover and eliminate either. —so hundreds of billions of dollars are pissed away. The Democrats feign innumeracy, suggesting that more and more MUST be spent and that since there's no news about waste and abuse (the media is complicit) it doesn't exist.

Is there a solution to all of this. Of course there is. Actually cut government expenditures year over year across the board ... including entitlements. How about a 5% across the board cut in year one, followed by 1% cuts for the next 4 years? All in conjunction with public sector work force reduction, privatizing select federal services, totally eliminating redundant government agencies and services, means testing certain entitlements, and improving efforts to reduce fraud, abuse and waste by incentivizing government employees with significant monetary rewards when savings are achieved.

The GOP is too afraid to make such a radical suggestion because the Dems would argue that actual cuts (a reduction in the increase in spending is NOT a cut) will starve little children and murder grandma. Meanwhile some in the GOP would claim that any cut to a bloated and inefficient defense budget would be an invitation to the CCP to sail up the Potomac. It's all B.S., but that's the reality of it.

And so ... every year or two, we go through the kabuki theater of debt talks.