Congress can’t avoid confrontation

Since the tragic shooting in Tucson, political commentators have made a habit of noting how “divisive” the country’s politics are, promising to rein in their rhetoric.  President Obama has asked for more polite discourse, and politicians have responded with the predictable gestures

Julia Vann | Daily Trojan

Speaker John Boehner has replaced “job killing” in his lexicon with “job destroying,” and Republicans and Democrats agreed to sit next to each other during the State of the Union address leading to numerous bad jokes about the high school prom.

Lost in what has seemed like a national celebration of harmony during the last few weeks  is that there still is a difference between actual cooperation and friendly rhetoric.

As long as both parties remain unwilling to compromise on or even begin to address the chief threats to American prosperity, Obama and Boehner can hold hands and sing “Kumbaya” as much as they want without using their positions to actually help anybody.

From the perspective of a USC student, there are two major problems that, if not resolved, will significantly diminish our opportunities in the future: unemployment and the deficit.

Students should be aware not only of the magnitude of these threats, but also that the “new spirit of cooperation” in Washington seems to only conceal political cowardice and inaction on both fronts.

Unemployment has been hovering just under 10 percent and falling slowly, but the progress is deceptive. Currently, the economy is not creating enough jobs to keep pace with new entrants into the workforce (read: today’s college graduates).

If, however, a USC graduate is able to find a steady job and embark on a promising career, down the line he might find that today’s politicians are making it rain on his parade.

The national debt is on its way past $14 trillion, and the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that this year’s deficit alone will approach $1.5 trillion, with $400 billion of that coming from December’s tax cut/unemployment insurance combo deal that was hailed as an archetype of bipartisan cooperation.

The bill for all this will come one day when our credit runs out, but today’s politicians seem inclined to leave that for the next generation (read: today’s college graduates).

Even though solutions to the unemployment problem seem to exacerbate the deficit problem, and vice versa, there is a way to address both. It will require reallocating the budget, reforming regulations and balancing the government’s books.

All three of these steps, however, require a combination of intelligence and cajones that are noticeably absent in Washington, as highlighted by Obama’s underwhelming State of the Union address.

There are a number of important regulatory reforms that ought to be undertaken, from finance to education. Yet it seems again that in the name of “cooperation” tough choices are being avoided.

For example, Obama has stopped calling out businesses for offshoring jobs and instead has named General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt as a main economic advisor, even though GE’s deal with China, announced last week, was arguably a symbol of everything that is wrong with our economic strategy.

Finally, there is the issue of balancing the books. Republicans want to cut 20 percent of discretionary spending, or 3.4 percent of the overall budget.

Given that our deficit is at 10 percent of GDP this year, the fact that this can pass for a reasonable suggestion is ludicrous (but for Democrats to call the Republicans out on it would be “uncivil”).

Democrats, on the other hand, have basically no plan to fix the deficit, because they lack the political courage to tell Americans what they do not want to hear: There is no way to fix the deficit without raising taxes.

Given these predicaments, the state of the union appears less than strong. But let’s not point that out — let’s be polite instead.

Surely we can find the appropriate balance of engaging in meaningful conversation without being too light — or too hard — on our political opponents.

Daniel Charnoff is a senior majoring in international relations (global business). His column, “Through the Static,” runs Fridays.