Debt or Alive

Playing the role of the harbinger of doom today will be Oliver Willis -- and I find it hard to disagree with him or anyone else who feels this way anymore.

"We face gigantic problems in the country and in the world. But our political machinery is simply incapable of even acknowledging the problems, much less fixing them. An economy paralyzed by job loss is being discussed as a debt problem, for Christ’s sake... We are doomed."

How bad is it right now? How shameful and embarrassing? Our government is seriously putting us in danger of defaulting, which will not only create economic chaos for us -- potentially thwarting any hope of a recovery and in fact very likely plunging us into an all-out depression -- but the shockwaves for the global economy could be calamitous. What's more, it's doing it over an entirely made-up crisis, mostly because the GOP and the Tea Party, I truly believe, would be willing to burn the whole country to the ground as long as it meant that Obama would be forced out of the White House.

Worrying about an eventual problem like the federal deficit instead of dealing with the immediate and grievous problem of nationwide unemployment is an almost incomprehensible lapse in logic. The Republicans are constantly lecturing about how Washington supposedly needs to conduct itself the way businesses and average American families do -- well, how many businesses and families do you know that put aside dealing with a crisis happening today in favor of one that will happen years from now? Even worse, who would be flat-out stupid and stubborn enough to do it knowing full-well that taking care of today's problem would actually help solve tomorrow's? If the economy begins running at full-capacity again, the deficit could be hacked down piece by piece. We've done it before -- as recently as the 1990s.

I swear, there are moments right now when I think we deserve to be invaded and have our government taken away from us for the greater good of everyone. We're now a threat to the entire world -- and isn't that the reason we always give for why a sovereign nation needs to be overthrown? Of course I don't really want that, but at what point will all of this finally stop?