Opinion : Budget crisis can only be solved by long, boring national discussion

"Dow Jones plunges as Super Committee fails"

That headline from yesterday's is one of the most distressing that Americans have seen in years.

No, it's not alarming because the Dow Jones average fell; that happens a lot. Many factors affect stock prices.

Nor is it particularly ominous because a committee in Congress failed to agree on how to get America out of debt. Congress has been failing spectacularly at that for generations.

What should really scare us about that headline is that it makes it appear that the people in Wall Street actually expected Congress to find a way to reduce the national debt.

Seriously? The people who make investments in American companies really had faith in the power of Congress to cut the deficit when, a few months ago, President Obama appointed the "Super Committee" as part of the deal that raised the debt ceiling while promising to cut the budget "later?"

There's only one way to solve our budget problem: A long and thorough and thoughtful (and very boring) discussion about who pays (or does not pay) taxes, and who gets money from Uncle Sam.

There is a simple explanation for our national debt crisis: A lot more people get money in some sort from the government than pay the government via taxes. The solution is simple: Reduce the number of people getting government money and increase the number of people paying taxes.

But deciding who should pay more to or get less from the government is where we get hung up.

A recent study by professors at Cornell University (the one in New York, not the college in Iowa) indicated that a large number of Americans who receive government assistance claim they have never participated in a government program.

Not knowing about government programs -- especially the ones that benefit us -- is a major part of the problem.

I recently sat around a table with about a dozen area guys, a mostly fiscally conservative group. One of them said, "You know, we gripe about government spending, but every one of us in this room has benefited from it."

Everyone agreed.

Too many Americans agree that government spending is excessive, unless it benefits them. But every dollar spent by government benefits someone, somewhere. It also costs someone, somewhere.

"If you torture numbers, they will tell you anything," said one numbers expert.

He is right. People can offer explanations for why taxes are too high, and spending is too low -- or way taxes are too low and spending too high -- using the same data.

A math non-expert (me) once wrote that the word "numbers" comes from the word "numb" and every time we start thinking about all of the numbers involved in our national budget woes, we go numb.
But solving our debt crisis is going to take a long, thoughtful, discussion about who pays taxes and who gets tax money. Long, thoughtful discussions are not something that happen enough in Congress, or its Super Committees.

If you want someplace to start, click HERE for a Citizens for Tax Justice report on which companies pay taxes (and which don't). Or click HERE for the Cornell report about Americans understanding of government programs.

But I have to warn you: These reports will be very, very boring to most readers. Our first budget battle will be the battle with boredom.