Times are tough out there I wouldn't be at all surprised to hear that some of you are having trouble making ends meet. These are dire times and they require firm leadership and a steady hand.That's why the United States is fucked. They haven't had either of those things in quite some time now. The most important positive contribution an American president has made in the last two decades is teaching us that the word "is" might have multiple meanings. It only goes rapidly downhill from there. Very rapidly and that thar fucking hill is awfully steep.
9/11 is a great example of what I'm talking about. The United States government could have gone before the people and told them its priorities and what it expected of the country to meet the present challenge. Things like energy policy review could be discussed. There might have been an honest re-appraisal of its foreign policy. Things like law enforcement procedure and immigration could have been looked into. I'm not saying that changing all of the above would have been necessary, but the discussion would have indicated that people were actually serious about something.
I like to imagine a debate I could have with, say, Bill O'Reilly on the topic of national security and energy.
Me: Given the connections of the Saudi government and theI greatly enjoy my fantasy debates. What say you?
9/11 hijackers, wouldn't it be wise to limit your commercial connections with a nation, which in part financed the murder of 3,000 of your citizens?
O'Reilly: WHAT ABOUT MY SUV, SIR? WHAT SAY YOU ABOUT
THAT? MY SUV ACTUALLY IS THE USA! JUST LOOK, THE LETTERS ARE ALMOST THE SAME! SUV-USA! SUV-USA!
Me: Well, Canada has a great deal of oil. So does Norway.
And Venezuela ....
O'Reilly: SOCIALISTS, SIR? ARE YOU SUGGESTING THAT THE USA
DEAL WITH SOCIALISTS? WHAT SAY YOU?
Me: As opposed to terrorists? And what about borrowing all that money from the Chinese, which is also a national security thre...
O'Rreilly: HE WON'T ANSWER THE QUESTION! HE HATES THE USA
MORE THAN NBC NEWS DOES! CUT HIS MIC! CUT IT NOW! NOW!!! AND GET HIS ADDRESS SO JESSE WATERS CAN AMBUSH HIM AT HOME! WHERE'S MY LOOFAH? WHERE IS IT?!?!
What happened instead was that the U.S government told the populace to buy themselves something nice. The post-9/11 policy was, as far as I've been able to determine, to make the world such an irreconcilable mess that everyone would be too distracted by the chaos to attack America. The craziest thing is that it seems to have actually worked. Unless you happen to be Israel, that is. Before 9/11, the Jewish state was surrounded by terrorists. Now they're surrounded by democratically elected terrorists. So the plan wasn't exactly perfect.
The same kind of thinking is at play today. This is the worst economic crisis since Johnny Weissmuller was the world's biggest star, and the American government is determined to meet the challenge by ignoring its causes and long-term effects. It really is adorable.
You know what caused the mess we're in right now? Stupidity.
It's really that simple; stupidity broke the world economy. Everybody in America, but no one so much as its government, spent so far beyond their means that it staggered the imagination. When your 12-year old paperboy starts bitching about the property taxes on his new McMansion, things are fucked almost beyond repair. The avarice of bankers and the willful blindness of people like Barney Frank and George W. Bush had a lot to do with it, too, but they aren't the root of the problem. Stupidity is.
At the governmental level, the Great American Spending Spree started in the mid-1960s, but it degenerated into complete mindlessness in 1981. That's when America's governing philosophy seemed to be that you can have it all and not pay for it. Taxes were cut and spending went through the roof. That's when the money party that started during the Kennedy-Johnson years evolved into a bacchanalian nightmare of epic proportions.
If supply-side economics is such a good idea, try it in your personal life. Go to your boss and tell him that you think that everybody would be better off if you were paid less. Then borrow a bunch of money to militarily fortify your backyard and give to your grandma. Send whatever's left to some psychopaths in Nicaragua and Afghanistan. Just for fun, have your own Department of Transportation and tell your bank that you need space-based nuclear lasers to keep your neighbor's kid off of your lawn. Make sure you let me know how that works out for you.
Actually, don't bother. I already know. And if you were paying attention, so do you. That teenagers, is how Bill Clinton, and his Seinfeld presidency came to be invented.
There was a brief period of what looked sanity in American government, but as Joe Scarborough points out in his new book, the Clinton administration and the Republican Congress had very little to do with balancing the federal budget. That happened because the Internet technology bubble temporarily produced more tax revenue than even Washington could spend in a timely fashion.
Then the bubble burst, revenue declined, and President Bush the Lesser gave whatever was left over away and started invading everybody. Once the imaginary, completely projected surplus (because America still had a staggering debt while it was enjoying "budget surpluses") was gone, he borrowed a bunch of cash from the communist Chinese to buy your grandfather's hard-on medicine and give giant agri-businesses more money to not plant things. In large part, this is why parts of New Orleans are still soggy and Afghanistan is an even bigger clusterfuck than it was eight years ago.
Then everything - and I want to be as technically accurate as I possibly can in describing this - went to shit. The Bush administration responded by teaming up with Nancy Pelosi, the Robin to his Batman, and giving away about $160 billion. This accomplished less than nothing and things got (in hyper-technical parlance) greatly shittier.
We don't currently, and might never know, what the bailout-a-go-go of the last ten months has cost. We know that the Bush and Obama administrations have put about two trillion dollars in a big pile and set it on fire under the guise various bailout and
Now you've got Vice President Joe Biden running around Virgina not only being wrong, but spectacularly so.
“And folks look, AARP knows and the people with me here todayWell, there you have it. I think you all now know what to do if you're afraid for the future. If the prospect of having the electricity shut off and being thrown out of your house is in your immediate future, you should take everything you can find in your kid's piggy-bank and your wife's credit card and go down to your local dirty bookstore.
know, the president knows, and I know, that the status quo is simply not
acceptable,” Biden said at the event on Thursday in Alexandria, Va. “It’s
totally unacceptable. And it’s completely unsustainable. Even if we wanted to
keep it the way we have it now. It can’t do it financially.”
“We’re going to go bankrupt as a nation,” Biden said.
“Now, people when I say that look at me and say, ‘What are you talking
about, Joe? You’re telling me we have to go spend money to keep from going
bankrupt?’” Biden said. “The answer is yes, that's what I’m telling
you.”
See that giant dildo on the wall there? Yeah, the black one. Ask the sweaty, hairy guy at the counter if it's magical. If he says yes, pay three times the sticker price for it. Then go home and hope for the best. Everything will be all right. The dildo will never let you down. Don't just take my word for it, take Joe Biden's.
I'd like to say that this is "Joe Biden's America", because the idea of the vice-president of the United States selling magical black dildos is the funniest thing I can imagine right now, but it isn't. The GOP is just as diagnosably retarded, with their policy prescriptions of "Duh, let's just give away even more money to investment bankers, so they don't wind up second-homeless."
No, my friends, that's just America: a fairy tale land where the solution to the inability to pay your bills is to spend even more money you don't have. Like Disneyland, it's a place where you don't ever have to grow up. Never mind that you're in imminent danger of Equatorial Guinea laughing at your welfare shoes and mustard sandwiches, everything's going to be just fine. Only in America would spending your way out of a hole that you spent yourselves into seem like a sane option.
I'll grant you that the inability to recognize reality is part of what made the United States great. That's how they went from having an army without guns in 1939 to being the greatest military power the world has ever known in just six years. It's also how they went to the moon just 66 years after the airplane was invented. Well, that's not entirely true. Elderly Nazis helped out with the whole space thing.
However, stretching the limits of imagination is greatly different than thinking that the laws of mathematics don't apply to you. That isn't defying the conventional wisdom as it is being economically autistic.
I love America more than any of you can ever know. That's why it saddens me so much that I'm sitting here trying to figure out a way to quarantine your economy before you take the rest of down with you. However much you want to be a slightly more religious version of Somalia, the rest of the world's aspirations are slightly different.
Ah, Joe. God bless 'im.
0 Yorumlar