Physical Cliff

I made the conscious decision to bite the bullet and go over a physical cliff of sorts over the holiday.  Double-hernia repair surgery.  It needed to be done.  I'd put it off for years. Each year it got worse and each year I resolved to get it fixed.  But year after year I just kept kicking that double-hernia can down the road.

 

This summer I got brave.  I scheduled the surgery for December 18th to give me a combination of sick days and holidays for recovery.  This is day 15 of my recovery by the way and I'm happy to report that it was far, far easier than I anticipated.  That's not to say that recovery has been a picnic.  It was uncomfortable to be sure but amazingly I experienced no real pain. I only took pain medicine for the first three days. On that pain scale of 1 - 10 with 10 being the worst pain you've ever experienced, in fifteen days I never got above a one.

 

Full recovery is a long way out.  My doctor says six weeks to return to most physical activities, two months or more to return to rigorous exercise.  I am very pleased to have this done and I'm really glad that I had both hernias repaired at the same time.  I expect that my quality of life will be greatly improved.  I'm glad I finally got brave enough to go over the physical cliff.

 

It seems to me that my personal double-hernia physical cliff is a pretty good metaphor for what our government calls the fiscal cliff.  Last night the Congress passed a measure that protected some Americans from some tax increases but did nothing to address out of control spending.  The Congress and the President just kicked the fiscal can down the road.

 

In a couple of months our country will hit the debt ceiling again and Congress will be faced with a choice, raise the debt ceiling and continue to borrow and spend money we do not have, or get brave and put a cap on spending.  To fix this gapping hole the Government must stop borrowing and spending more than it takes in, stop raising taxes, stop rewarding failure, stop punishing success, stop meddling in the private sector, stop building the nanny state, stop manipulating our currency, and stop trying to be Greece.

 

Sure it will hurt a little to go over the fiscal cliff.  Recovery from decades of reckless spending and government dependency won't be a picnic.  But my guess is that it will hurt a lot less than we think it will and that the pain will be short lived.  With a return to sound economic principles our economy will soar.  Prosperity will explode.  If we bite the bullet and go over the fiscal cliff now our future and the future of our children and grandchildren will be much brighter.  It is time to stop kicking the fiscal can down the road!

 

Mark VanSchuyver