My Canadian counterpart has figured out who is to blame for the lousy economy.
Some asshole named Grover Norquist:
There was a point in the late 1970s when American conservative politics became completely disconnected from reality, particularly on economic policy. Remember, it was Ronald Reagan who believed that you could cut taxes, spend a veritable shitload of money, run massive deficits, and everything would work out just fine. Some people forget Reagan’s involvement in that, given how George W, Bush and Barack Obama have since turned that retarded philosophy into a retarded science.
Well, everything didn’t end up being all right. The period of the late 70s and early 80s was when the United States transformed itself into a debt-based economy. If you were paying attention last fall, you might have picked up on the fact that it hasn’t worked out that well. And idiots like Grover Norquist helped make that possible.
Hating Norquist for being a scumbag lobbyist is always a good place to start, but by no means is that all there is to it. His bad ideas about virtually everything are one of the primary causes behind the Republican party’s slow-motion self-destruction.
You see, Grover is the Godfather of the idea that you should never, ever, never raise taxes; no matter how many wars your country is fighting at once, how many of your cities are underwater, and how much catastrophic debt statutory entitlement programs are creating. The Norquist answer is to cut spending, which never happens because something called politics gets in the way.
Voters are inherently dishonest and stupid, almost as much as Norquist himself, and they tend to like multiple wars and insane program spending. That’s why you don’t see politicians promising to cut Social Security and Medicare and stop invading everybody. Instead they talk about “pork”, which accounts for exactly nothing as a percentage of the budget and voters tend to like as well. They want their sports stadium, they just don’t want anybody else to have one.
That might sound harsh, but that, my friends, is reality. All the mindless bitching to the contrary, American voters don’t just like unnecessary spending, they love it. If they didn’t, it would have been stopped by now. That’s why presidential elections are decided by dumb shit that has nothing to do with the presidency, like the Pledge of Allegiance, gay marriage, “Hope” and places called Hope. When someone decides to be a real show-off, they promise to build bridges through time itself.