Originally Posted By: six_of_one

What really needed to happen, to be honest, was for us to actually go over the cliff, have everyone's taxes raised, and the draconian cuts to programs to have occurred -- in a more perfect world, how this would have happened and in what time frame would have been managed to ease the resultant and necessary pain this country will eventually need to endure to correct our course. But political reality and the economy dictated that wasn't going to happen, so now I'm not really sure what is the way forward ...

Agree 100%

That political reality was this: