What the Beltway elite could learn from a drunk

It is said that even a blind hog finds an acorn every now and then. Obama's compromise on tax rates has proven the point. He finally did something right, not because he was trying to, but because he just stumbled across it.

But still he was not happy.

"On the Republican side, this is their holy grail, these tax cuts for the wealthy. It seems to be their central economic doctrine."

Thus did the community organizer who has never run a business show his ignorance of what true economic health entails.

Obama and the left have their own central economic doctrine, however, though they prefer not to talk about it. To understand that doctrine, we need to look not to economics but to the alcohol rehabilitation ward.

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Early in my career as a psychologist, I was assigned to work in a substance-abuse treatment unit. Armed with years of academic training, I quickly found out just how much I had to learn, and I learned it from recovering alcoholics with little or no formal training in the behavioral sciences.

I learned that recovery from addiction was a spiritual process that begins with a fearless and searching assessment of one's predicament. Recovery involved more common sense and less psychotherapy.

For example, consuming too much alcohol might be enjoyable at the time, but then comes the morning and the dreaded hangover. The common-sense solution is to endure the pain and learn from the experience. But those on the path to addiction learn to ease the pain of the hangover with "the hair of the dog that bit them." More alcohol temporarily relieves the pain of the hangover.

Soon there is another hangover, followed by more "hair of the dog" to escape the pain. The cycle continues until the person is in the full grip of the alcoholic's dilemma: Recovery will mean breaking the "hair of the dog" cycle, and that is going to hurt. But avoiding the hurt will lead to death.

That is the choice confronting the American economy right now: Pain now or death later.

The collapse of the mortgage market in 2008 was inevitable after passage of the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977. Congress, aided by both Democrat and Republican administrations, required banks to make loan decisions based on political rather than economic criteria. The short-term result was a drunken party in the housing market.

The Democrats gave the economic booze to their constituents and were repaid with votes. The Beltway Republicans, like the spouse who buys the booze to keep the alcoholic from becoming abusive, enabled the process.

Union deals with General Motors and with states like California followed the same pattern. Live it up now, forget about tomorrow.

When the hangover hit with full force in 2008, what was the response inside the Beltway? More hair of the dog. Bailouts, stimulus plans, pork spending, anything to drown out reality and delay the inevitable.

With our national debt approaching $14 trillion, America faces the economic equivalent of liver disease. And raising taxes would be like the medieval practice of bleeding the patient.

A poem by A. E. Housman sums up our situation. A young lad has been to Ludlow Fair and has had quite a drunken good time. He has looked "into the pewter pot to see the world as the world's not." Hope and change in a beer mug.

But, after losing his necktie and sleeping in a ditch, he awakens to reality:

"… the world, it was the old world yet,

I was I, my things were wet …"

Hope does not change reality. A common-sense look at our situation shows that the country has been on a government-spending bender, and the economic hangover will be ugly indeed.

Despite tea-party Republican successes in killing the Democrats' tax hikes and pork bill, experience tells us that the Beltway insiders who still dominate Washington will not welcome recovery. They are the ones pushing the economic rotgut to delay our appointment with reality. Besides, they are insulated from the joblessness and the ruined retirement accounts that result. Look at the bonuses paid at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as they presided over the collapse of the housing market.

What incentive do they have to cut the customer off? When the pain hits and the customers take to the streets, as they have in European countries, the hair of the dog will flow.

To get this country off the socialist sauce, Americans cannot wait for the bartender to cut us off. We need to do a fearless and searching moral inventory and face up to our own role in the nation's economic sickness.

The Beltway cannot push the rotgut if we do not demand it.

Tim Daughtry is a conservative writer, speaker and political consultant with Concord Bridge Consulting in Greensboro, N.C.