The political class

There's been much talk about the pitifully horrible quality and competence of the political class as perhaps the biggest contributor to our nation's fiscal problems.  This recent post regarding Joe Biden's thoughts on the wisdom of a payroll tax cut bears out the validity of this judgment in spades. Joe Biden is a career politician who has been in the Senate for over 30 years and who has a son who is following his footsteps as a career politician.  These folks, and there are many, many of them in the government today,  have long since forgotten how to reason and think logically.  Theirs is a make-believe world where money is a plaything by which they are enabled to buy votes and satisfy the needs of the rent seekers who want to pervert capitalism through special legislation, e.g. General Motors, General Electric, big banks, etc.  It is for this reason the emergence of the Tea Party is such an important event.  In most cases of the Tea Party candidates who were successful in their campaigns for public office we found the likes of Tennessee's new senator, Rand Paul,  people who had successful careers in other fields who are not careerists.  This is the model the founders had in mind when they formulated our checks and balances, limited government in the 18th century.  People should volunteer some time to help make laws and then return to the private sector to live, like everyone else, under those laws they helped create.  What we have now is professional politicians, mostly lawyers, who glom onto the now lucrative jobs of representative and senator, buy votes any way they can, and stay in place for decades, is many cases.  This is not what the founders had in mind and is what term limits were about.  Except in the case of a few state legislatures, that very good idea went the way of the dodo bird somehow or the other and that's a shame.  Joe Biden is the poster child for the professional politician.  He's a shamelessly insincere panderer, and he has no principles other than perpetuating himself  in office.  The result: a buffoon who has no idea what he's talking about and doesn't even know how ridiculous his thoughts are when published.  It gets really difficult to imagine how we are going to survive with this kind of leadership.