A Balanced Approach?

As I'm sure most of you have already heard, President Obama and his fellow Democrats have been advocating "a balanced approach" do reducing the deficit and producing an economic recovery.  Of course, what they mean by "balanced approach" is lots of tax increases and cuts to the military, along with some severely limited entitlement reforms.  Personally I'm left wondering where the balance is in that, but that just goes to show what an extremist I am.  But even if they did really want a balanced approach, is a balanced approach what we really need?  I would say no.  Although talking about compromises and balanced approaches may warm the hearts of sum and evoke fuzzy feeling attacks, I see no evidence that it gets the job done (that is compromises, although talk doesn't get anything done either for that matter).  After all, compromises and bipartisanship are what got us to where we are now anyway.

Furthermore, one of the most important government reforms in the entire history of our nation was about as partisan as it gets.  After the civil war, the republican party did all kinds of things from freeing the slaves (officially, I don't put much weight on the emancipation proclamation) to shifting the balance of power from the states to the federal government.  They did this because the majority of their opponents had recently been crushed and utterly ruined by the civil war and they didn't need to worry about making compromises.  As far as I can tell, great things are not done by bipartisan agreements.  Even healthcare was completely partisan, it only passed because the Democrats had complete control of every branch of government (although I would call obamacare a great evil rather than a "great thing").

In addition to this, it seems logical to reason that if one thing is productive (like cutting taxes and reducing government spending and regulation) then the opposite is counter productive (like raising taxes on the rich and increasing government spending and regulation).  Therefore, doing a little bit of both isn't productive either because the counter-productive measures cancel out the productive ones.  Because of this any bipartisan measure must unproductive (unless everyone agrees on everything, but then bipartisanship isn't necessary because everyone is in the same party anyway).

Unfortunately this has another implication.  The problem isn't that congress won't compromise on anything (that would be stupid), it's that Americans have elected the wrong people to do the job.  As long as we keep voting in socialists we're going to get more of what what we've already got.  Maybe, just maybe, if we elect conservatives we can get some real reform passed.  The responsibility is the American peoples.