Harsh? Maybe. Untrue? Hardly. What the 2012 election made clear, and what subsequent events have confirmed, is that a special kind of cognitive dissonance has infected the body politic on two fronts: 1) the notion that the players can stay the same, but somehow, magical change will occur and 2) that cutting is well and good so long as it does not affect me.
The dissonance is augmented by confirmation bias, where people tune in to news and information sources that will confirm their pre-existing beliefs. It's what allows Obama supporters to cheerlead when the President in 2011 vowed to veto efforts to block sequestration and also cheerlead today when he proclaims the sequester as equivalent to the end of days. On the other side, the same Repubs whose majority through 2006 ushered in all manner of new and higher spending suddenly found fiscal religion when the next POTUS, not a Repub, continued that trend.
The nation is mired in debt, the economy is stagnant at best, dependency keeps growing, but the pretense out of DC is that cutting a single dime of federal spending will mean children in the streets eating old people and the nation being taken over by radical jihadists. And this is being said by people whom we elected. Makes you wonder who is more stupid, them or us.
The intellectual dishonesty in this argument is that no one is really discussing cuts as you, me, and the dictionary would define them; no, in DC cuts mean reductions in the rate of growth. Therefore, if your employer planned to give you a ten-thousand dollars raise but because of some circumstance was only able to give you eight-thousand, in DC-speak your salary was actually cut. Yup, that's what I said; when the increase is less than anticipated, that amounts to a cut among the elected class.
We have a system that is unsustainable. Gimmicks like the payroll tax holiday are just that, gimmicks, and should be called that. In a normal free society, a watchdog press would do that. But we don't have a watchdog media,we have an activist media more intent on propagating its point of view than in calling bullshit on stupidity. And so, here we are.
In the abstract, people love the concept of change but in the concrete, they want it to only apply to other people. No one is willing to give up their free pony, not even if they subconsciously realize that the pony will be taken away by necessity at some point. We have benefits with built-in disincentives to regaining self-sufficiency, we have people who will get more out of certain programs than they ever put in but they see no problem with that, and we have an increasingly lazy populace that believes govt always knows best, despite ample evidence to the contrary.
Self-indulgent pricks. It's who we have become. It's who we shown every sign of remaining for a long time. It's not the mark of a republic that values liberty, self-reliance, or limited govt. It's embarrassing.
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