I received this from a friend and I pass it on the Doper community:
Warren Buffett, in a recent interview with CNBC, offers one of the
best quotes about the debt ceiling:
“I could end the deficit in 5 minutes,” he told CNBC. "You just pass a
law that says that anytime there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP,
all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election. The
26th amendment (granting the right to vote for 18 year-olds) took only
3 months &
8 days to be ratified! Why? Simple! The people demanded it. That was
in 1971…before computers, e-mail, cell phones, etc. Of the 27
amendments to the Constitution, seven (7) took 1 year or less to
become the law of the land…all because of public pressure.
Warren Buffet is asking each addressee to forward this email to a
minimum of twenty people on their address list; in turn ask each of
those to do likewise. In three days, most people in The United States
of America will have the message. This is one idea that really should
be passed around.
Only the first two sentences are Buffet’s, according to snopes. And he was talking particularly about the deficit ceiling fight, and his solution was pretty clearly in jest.
I really hope that that quote is taken out of context in some way. I used to have a bit more respect for Buffet.
We had deficits between 4.5% and 6% of GDP during the administrations of Reagan and Bush I. During WWII, we had deficits of nearly 30%.
Simply throwing Congress out, (and how do we handle senators with three or five years left in their terms when the deficit may fall before they are up for re-election?), will not actually fix anything. Buffet is proposing that threatening congresscritters will magically make them all reasonable people–an absurd belief. (And how does turning Congress into a body of rookies help the nation in a period where we simply need to spend the money, such as a war?)
It’s an embarrassingly stupid idea that could only be embraced by someone wholly unfamiliar with the hundreds of ways clever accountants can massage numbers to say whatever they want to when they are allowed to. To state the obvious, Warren Buffet is not such a person.
Can’t speak on the efficacy of such a plan, but I will say it seems royally unfair. What if you and a handful of others senators are actually trying to get bills through, and you’re being stone-walled by ideological bastards? Why should everyone get punished?
He said it, but he was being sort of tongue in cheek. He was commenting on the threat to refuse to extend the debt limit unless the budget was balanced, and talking about the idea that only some sort of extreme threat is necessary to get the deficit down. And he’s saying like, “Well, if you really want an extreme threat, the better one is just to say, 'if you don’t balance the budget, everyone in Congress loses their jobs.”
For that matter, it seems like it would reward obstruction by the minority party. If they can prevent any initiatives to bring the deficit under 3%, the whole congress is prevented from running again. If they think they’re in a position to pick up the majority, or even gain seats, they’d have every reason to stonewall.
Would individual members of Congress fall on their sword (losing their own seat) in order to get the entire opposition declared ineligible? I don’t want to find out.
Since it has been debunked, can I say what a ridiculous idea it would be and it saddens me that people are forwarding this email actually thinking it’s a good idea?
It sounds like a punishment in 3rd grade recess. Since JOHNNY can’t play by the rules, we all have to go inside before the bell rings. Bad Johnny.
And the entire purpose of that type of punishment was to get the kids to gang up on the guy. Now, if they didn’t know it was JOHNY, it could have been a tactic to get some to “tell on him.” But otherwise it just promoted vigilantism.