Don't be fooled by political blame game

I find it interesting how the media consistently attributes the budget deficit to government overspending instead of unregulated financial institutions’ greed, which leads to a worldwide market crash.

Perhaps media owners’ investment in these financial institutions may have something to do with the kind of reporting we hear and read.
Why should you care?

I’m assuming that, as educated and responsible citizens of this great nation and state, you are going to vote before 7 p.m. on Nov. 2. Better yet, exercise your right and responsibility by taking advantage of the SUB polling location this week through Saturday.

I bring up what should be obvious recent history because the facts about what happened in the last three years and the eight years leading up to the Great Recession have been skewed by those with an interest to bring us back to the policies that originally got us in this mess.
With all the fervor to “throw out da bums” (in office today), we, the people, have forgotten what got us here in the first place — here being a recession with unprecedented unemployment not seen since the Great Depression.

We got here from years of increasingly laissez-faire regulations on financial institutions whose greed created untenable and irresponsible “investment products.” Those eventually caused the world’s economy to come to a screeching halt right around the time we voted these bums into office today.

In other words, most of the people we blame, knee-jerk fashion, for our woes were not around, or not in power, when the decisions that led to our current situation were made.

Let’s not forget the first stimulus package was signed by outgoing Bush 43, not incoming Obama 44. That means that the Great Recession started with the previous administration and was created during that administration’s eight-year reign.

Clinton 42 handed Bush 43 a healthy economy along with a budget surplus. Bush 43 handed Obama 44 a sick economy with record deficits.
When pointing fingers, people need to remember that this situation has never happened before (the Great Depression notwithstanding) and the decisions that have been made so far by either administration were made in a vacuum of applicable experience.

But there are several things we do know.
The first is that the closest thing to our current situation was the Great Depression, and we got ourselves out of it by spending (and ultimately WWII helped a lot).

We need to know that worldwide government budget deficits were not caused by “overspending.” They were caused by a crashing economy that left otherwise reasonable budgets considerably short — and budgets are written at least one year in advance, if not more.

For the past year and three-quarters, you have watched people in office try to figure out how to pull us out of a crashed economy caused by policies created when others were in power. If undoing these policies is not enough to get us out of this mess, then voting those who would repeat these policies back into office is simply stupid.

In other words, voting “da bums” out who’ve been in power less than two years isn’t the way to move forward.
Please don’t forget to vote on or before Nov. 2. Not voting is the same as voting against your own interests. There is too much at stake to do that.