Flapdoodle

I think Megan McArdle hits the nail on the head:

It is tempting to blame the candidates, but ultimately, I blame the situation. The candidates do not have a big program, because there is no money to pay for big programs. Whoever spends the next four years is going to have to do some unpleasant things to taxes and spending. No one wants to hear about those things, and they certainly don’t want to tell us about them. And so we have piddling personal attacks, half-hearted promises, and vapid reaffirmations that America is so great because it’s exceptional, and exceptional because it’s America.

I also liked this paragraph:

The true object of these debates is to say as little as possible about anything of substance. Mitt Romney promises to be Obama Lite, with one third less social democracy than regular Barack Obama- but fortified with a full day’s RDA of social conservatism! Barack Obama claims that Mitt Romney only wants to be president so that he can invest the Social Security trust fund in companies that will ship all our jobs to China- jobs that under Barack Obama would be done by hard-working American robots. It is a carnival of claptrap, a festival of flapdoodle.

Of course, read the whole thing.

For as long as I’ve been paying attention to politics, the game has been about what a candidate is going to give their constituents, be it tax cuts, some kind of money for health care, retirement income, legislation that kills competition, some kind of government contract to make something or research something, or money for education. No one that I can remember has stated “I’m going to take something away.”

I understand the reasons. We all want someone to give us things because, deep down, we know that we deserve it. We worked hard all our lives and it’s about time we collected our just rewards. So when James Q. Politician comes along with his legion of “expert” enablers and says he’s got a plan, we uncritically swallow it because we want to believe and, after all, we’ll only be around for so long anyway. Might as well get ours along the way.

Short of guaranteeing that everyone will get a job, though, it’s hard to imagine what else can be promised at this point. Even if something more could be promised, where’s the money going to come from to provide it?

In my humble opinion, the math of the federal budget doesn’t add up for either of these guys. We can’t tax our way back to a balanced budget, and we can’t cut enough programs because too many people are dependent on those programs. Politicians have, over the years, systematically over-promised to the American people and the result is a government that wants to legislate away risk, at the expense of one citizen for another.

The day is coming where we will discuss who’s going to get screwed and how; what promises the government has made but can’t be keep. But today is not that day. Today, we get flapdoodle.