Can be found in a single blog post from The Economist magazine. Read this and you will understand the situation we are in, and what we are facing. Read it, and you will understand why we are facing ten-plus years of decisions about who will be made worse off, and in what way, due to the financial and fiscal frat party of the past 30 years. It wasn't just the public sector. It was businesses and individual households. It was beyond my understanding, and contrary to my values.
The popular thing to do, what most people wanted to do, was to satisfy the "I want for me now!" impulse. This was done by selling the future. The deal was cut in New York, and the fees were large. And now it is the future. The executive/financial class may promise three percent GDP growth if you keep their taxes low and their pay sky high, and the political/union class may promise seven percent returns on public employee pension funds to put off sacrificing the rest of us for the deals they did with themselves. Not true.
At this point, anyone screaming that they shouldn’t have less, or (incredibly) that they should be getting more, is basically saying that their share of this burden should be borne by someone else. Many of those shouting the loudest are those who took the most while it was there to take, which I continue to find infuriating.
I was going to write a long series of blog posts on what the budgetary options are at the federal level, but I can’t get motivated to do work that no one may ever see due to the problems on the site. I’ve tried to wring and post this more than once. I can say that with everyone in power trying to engineer consent to running up an even greater burden on the future and those who will live in it, to avoid living in the present they have created, I hope we go over the “fiscal cliff.” Even if it means a recession. The economy of paying most Americans less and less and yet the whole world economy being dependent on them spending more and more cannot continue.