Investors.com posted an article yesterday about Speaker Boehner’s plan to deal with the debt ceiling.  They acknowledged (along with most of us) that the plan is not perfect, but they also realize the practical aspects of getting a bill through Congress. 

One of the basic facts the article points out:

“Despite the widespread notion that raising tax rates automatically means collecting more revenue for the government, history says otherwise.

“As far back as the 1920s, Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon pointed out that the government received a very similar amount of revenue from high-income earners at low tax rates as it did at tax rates several times as high.”

This has to do with the fact that high-income earners often have a better understanding of how money works than the rest of us and can put their money in places that protect it from taxes, such as overseas investments, which do very little to increase tax revenue in America.

The artice reminds us:

“The most basic fact of life is that we can make our choices only among the alternatives actually available. It is not idealism to ignore the limits of one’s power. Nor is it selling out one’s principles to recognize those limits at a given time and place, and get the best deal possible under those conditions.

“That still leaves the option of working toward getting a better deal later, when the odds are more in your favor.”

It is time for the Tea Party to step back, take a deep breath, and prepare for 2012.  Anything else will insure that President Obama will be a two-term President and America as we know it will no longer exist.  I realize that is a strong statement, but look how much damage President Obama has done to the Constitution in two and a half years.  This is the time to be practical, even though it is tempting to hold out for radical spending reductions–they are not going to happen with the current Senate and current President.  I wish we could slash and burn the budget, but we really can’t right now.  Hopefully, there will be a time for that after 2012.  Rome was not built in a day, and the leviathan that the American government has become will not go down easily.