Liberals Should LOVE America’s Economic Slowdown

by John Hawkins | August 19, 2011 7:55 am

I’m 100 pages into Mark Steyn’s extraordinary book After America: Get Ready for Armageddon[1]” and I’m already wishing we could make it mandatory reading for every American in the country. Incidentally, if anyone does buy that many copies and ship them out to everyone in the country, I’d like a 1% cut of sales for suggesting the idea.

There will be a Steyn[2] interview up on the website Monday, but in the interim, here’s one of the many, many excerpt-length quotations from the book that deserve to be spread far and wide across the country.

At the end of 2008, a few weeks after Barack Obama’s historic election, the media reported on America’s Christmas shopping spree. “Retail Sales Plummet,” read the headline in the Wall Street Journal. “Sales plunged across most categories on shrinking consumer spending.”

That’s great news isn’t it? After all, everyone knows Americans consume too much. What was it that then Senator Obama had said on the subject only a few months before? “We can’t just keep driving our SUVs, eating whatever we want, keeping out homes at 72 degrees at all times regardless of whether we live in the tundra or desert and keep consuming 25 percent of the world’s resources with just four percent of the world’s population, and expect the rest of the world to say, “You just go ahead, we’ll be fine.”

And by jiminy, we the took the great man’s words to heart. SUV sales nosedived, and 72 is no longer your home’s thermostat setting but its current value as expressed as a percentage of what you paid for it. If I understand the president’s logic, in a just world Americans would be 4 percent of the population and consume 4 percent of the world’s resources. And in his first year in office we made an excellent start toward that blessed utopia: Americans were driving smaller cars, buying smaller homes, giving smaller Christmas presents.

And yet, strangely the Obama administration wasn’t terribly happy about the Obamafication of the U.S. economy. The Democrats immediately passed a bazillion dollar “stimulus” package to “stimulate” us back into our bad old ways, and, when that didn’t work, Ben Bernanke at the Federal Reserve printed another gazillion dollars in “quanitative easing” to lure us back into the malls.

And how did the rest of the world, of whose tender sensibilities Senator OBama was so mindful, feel about the collapse of the American consumer excess? They were aghast, and terrified — and you would be if you suddenly found yourself strapped into a nightmare ride on a one-way express elevator to the abyss.”

Isn’t America’s economic slowdown what liberals like Barack Obama have been calling for? Haven’t they been saying they want energy costs to go up? Having they been demanding we cut back on consumption to safeguard the environment and prevent global warming? Aren’t they the ones who want America to consume less resources?

Well, congratulations, liberals. You got your wish! Why aren’t you happy? We have people whose economic policies will turn America into a basket case, like Greece or Cuba — but then when things start to get bad, it’s, “We didn’t do it! You can’t prove we did it! We blame Bush and, and, and….The Tea Party!”

Hey, liberals, if you want to implement the same economic policies that are ruining Greece, then that’s what the country will look like when we’re done. The only hope liberals have for avoiding that fate is that the country will deteriorate slowly enough that they’ll die off before it completely falls apart and given how quickly we seem to be going down the backside of the mountain, that’s not a safe bet unless you’re about to expire.

Liberals have been calling for economic policies that will inevitably lead to ruin and now they’re beginning to get their wish. They should be honest enough to own it.

Endnotes:
  1. After America: Get Ready for Armageddon: http://www.amazon.com/After-America-Get-Ready-Armageddon/dp/1596981008/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1313752840&sr=8-1
  2. Steyn: http://www.steynonline.com/

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