In the past few weeks, months and years we have heard from both parties that America has a debt crisis and we better fix it now. However, both the Republicans and the Democrats remind me of the Scarecrow from the movie “The Wizard of Oz” because they use both hands to point the blame at someone else.

Each party, every president and every political pundit passes the blame to the other team to avoid admitting they all sat by and watched as our financial future got scarier and scarier. WAKE UP CALL…they are all to blame.

Debt and trillion dollar deficits don’t have a party affiliation. Wait, you might be thinking “I thought Obama’s Stimulus was to blame, or maybe it was Bush’s Iraq War that put us in this $14,000,000,000,000 hole we find ourselves in.”

From earmarks to entitlements there was a politician who took the credit when cost wasn’t an option, but no one wants to come to the table to figure out how to pay for it.

Where do we start? Well, every president for the past 20 years has had a Debt Reduction Commission that produced recommendations no one followed. Why don’t we take the Bush report and Obama report and tell each party they get to pick a recommendation from the other party’s debt commission report and vote on it as a package? Sounds fair, right? We can keep doing this until we put this nation back on a path of fiscal prosperity.

The answer isn’t closed-door meetings and threats made on a news channel to score political points. The answer is sensible statesmen coming to the table with nothing in mind except for securing the financial security of our nation.

Simply put, unless we can pay our bills as a nation we can’t live up to ANY promises that have been made over the last few decades. We cannot afford the military, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Veteran Care, Medicare Part D, high speed rail, green technology, the Department of Education, the National Endowment of the Arts, levees, dikes, roads, bridges, and so on if we can’t get our debt under control. This list is just a sample of the long list of federal programs.

This isn’t about Democrat or Republican anymore. This is about the future country we are handing to our children. What will they think when they read the history books and learn that we chose petty politics over their financial future?

The last bite…

It isn’t too often that I am completely blown away by a restaurant, but Friday night Courtney and I stumbled upon (literally) Bouche Restaurant on Tchoupitoulas Street in New Orleans. The setting: an old dungeon wine cellar; the food: authentic Cajun; and the service: impeccable. We ate Gulf shrimp and grits covered in a tasso cream sauce, the best macaroni and cheese I have ever tasted (sorry Mom) topped with crumbled Andouille, and finished the meal with a graham cracker crust key lime pie topped with fresh whipped cream and a Louisiana strawberry sauce. I give Bouche 5 (out of 5) crumbs!

Buddy Boe, a resident of LaPlace, is a former parish administrator and is well known on the local political (and food) scenes. His column appears every Wednesday in L’Observateur.