Last Blog: The Blog To End All Blogs! Post-Election Blog! BLOG!
Everyone needs to calm down over this election. All I have seen in the pages of every newspaper, including our own, and every news station is massive outcries over how this election will undo our society or how this will be the reinvigoration that we need as a nation to get back on track. If we listen to the Left we learn that we will be out of debt, with no unemployment, and our image will be fixed across the world while the Right has us believe that Obama’s socialist plot will cripple our economy and have us all out for nightly inspections of our homes. Neither is the case and there are (at least) three reasons why.
1) Partisan politics will not be fixed because Obama got a second term. I am sorry democrats and vociferous Obama lovers, your man will not fix everything overnight so you are setting yourselves up for hurt. Obama is still demanding increasing the taxes on the wealthiest Americans while not looking at genuine spending cuts, and while tax increases are needed all around if we are to escape fiscal ruin, the Republicans will only “broaden the tax base” by eliminating loop-holes and deductions and are still demand massive spending cuts. Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are the biggest factors in our debt, and they will not be touched in any substantial way by either party. This “fiscal cliff” that everyone languishes over is pointless. The government will not allow massive defense cuts to happen overnight, their constituents would never have it and they would face a tough reelection.
2) We are still going to be embroiled in foreign wars and international affairs. With the Obama administration deciding that Bush’s foreign policy looked appetizing, they have come full circle to drone warfare and the erosion of civil liberties. The United States launches 33 drone strikes a month, over 300 in Pakistan since Obama took office, we have killed thousands of civilians and only emboldened, and in many circumstances created, our enemies, and we have decided through NDAA that the President has unlimited authority to detain and execute Americans citizens, and with the extension of the Patriot Act by President Obama, it seems that all we have is more of the same.
3) Lastly, all we do have is more of the same. Who really expected the 2008 or 2012 elections to be filled with qualitative and genuine change? For years we have been seeing the solidification of Executive Power through the use of Executive Orders or the just outright ignoring of the constitutional process. For years we have watched government and big business collude to ensure the stability of the economy instead of letting the market handle itself. For years we have waited for marijuana to be legalized, marriage equality to be legal, government transparency, the War on Drugs to end, accountability on the part of our representatives, campaign finance reform, we have waited for education to get better but it has stagnated and fallen since the 1970s. We have waited and waited for all of these things, yet none have come.
If anyone thinks that this election is meaningful, they are kidding themselves. It will only be meaningful to the Republicans who, since they got defeated so handedly, must now recuperate and decide what direction to take their party. Hopefully it will be a less racially and sexually exclusive one. Every election is treated as the defining election of our generation, and this is no different. We have been spending too much for far too long and we have been slashing taxes for far too long, and we must solve our problems, but I can assure everyone, that it will not be in this administration, nor in any in the near future. This is not to say that there will be nothing happening, we will continue to watch power become ever centralized, as we have since the turn of the 20th century, within the hands of the few. So everyone can relax, nothing is going to change, our leaders enjoy their positions of power far too much to disrupt the status quo.