Missing the End of the World

Well, 11:11 A.M. 12/21/12 has come and gone; I showed a film and offered ten easy points to my students who showed up on the last day before Winter Break, and missed the end of the world.  Well, I'm being facetious.  I've always taken Jesus' admonition about the future events being known only to God the Father quite seriously, so I suppose I had very good reasons for figuring that the day would go like any other.

However, maybe our political world will be in for a shakeup now that The Most Brilliant POTUS Ever has decided to kick the can of ballooning national debt and unfunded entitlements down the road to another generation.  We're probably going over the fiscal cliff as I write. Maybe we will be seeing the end of Politics as Usual in Washington

While driving in to work today, I heard the local news station interviewing a professor of economics from the U of Maryland.  The learned gentleman said that if we are going to cover the commitments our wise, virtuous, and humane leaders have made [adjectives mine], all of us--rich, poor, and middle class-- will have to accept at least a 40% rise in taxes.  Uncle Cephas thinks he understands that the good professor was underscoring the seriousness of America's fiscal mess; but as a teacher, he doubts that there are many other people in America who can see that, too.

Uncle Cephas also observes that given the President's media cheering section, nobody will be reminded of the O's "no middle class tax hike" promises or his passing another major entitlement in the midst of a deep economic crisis, and when our modest little recovery gets derailed, it will all be the fault of the Republican-dominated House of Representatives. Our partisan politics will then get uglier and uglier.