Anyway, here’s what I wrote:
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The whole thing is unfixable.
We can’t sustain the high standard of living that we’ve generally taken for granted and think is our right. We simply have too many people for everyone to have a comfy life. We can’t take care of everyone.
Now, by that, I don’t mean the health care / welfare. I mean, we cannot have people of average skills somehow having it all – nice house, 9-5, weekends off, 2 cars, 2.5 kids, college, etc. We had that for a very short time, and it was because of the baby boom and WW2 – they set us up to be the manufacturing/commerce giant of the world, and everything fed off of that. But that’s not so anymore (and it’s not coming back, because we’ve proven, as consumers, that we’ll take low price over an American job every time.) The giant middle class is an unsustainable anomaly. But we will argue to the last before addressing that point – it’s very hard to go backwards.
So back to politics – until we admit the above, the problems are unfixable, because the arguments and the issues of the day assume the standard of living we’ve become very accustomed to is kept. We want all that stuff, plus health care. Or we want all that stuff, plus lower taxes and cheap gas. That’s why we keep borrowing, as a government and consumers both. We’re trying, very desperately, to keep a standard of living we’ve come to really like quite a bit. Parents will whip out the credit card before they let little Johnny have a substandard Christmas, and our government will do bailout after bailout to keep things at an even keel. Which isn’t going to work.
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