Debt debate: dogmatism and principles

Like most Americans, I found the whole prolonged squabbling about raising the debt limit frustrating and troubling.

We, indeed, have a dysfunctional federal government that is mired in partisan politics mostly, in my opinion, on the Republican side. The Tea Party Republicans were willing to possibly bring even more economic pain to the country and especially to the middle-class and working-class people simply out of their dogmatic position on shrinking the federal government, even though by doing it would severely impact those who need federal assistance such as the unemployed, the elderly, the sick, students, etc.

The corporate and Wall Street Republicans such as Speaker John Boehner, in turn, dogmatically refuse to consider taxing the extremely wealthy in order to have them pay their fair share of federal expenditures.

Such dug-in positions result in deadlock and in so-called compromises that are anything but balanced as President Obama calls for, although obviously he didn’t get it and didn’t seem willing to fight for it.

So, on the one hand, we have dogmatism; on the other, we have a willingness to fight for principles. The result is, not only frustrating, but inertia and one that only hurts the majority of well-meaning Americans.