What Did You Expect?

Faced with great challenges, we're learning that the US Congress has no great talent for governing. Who knew?

After all, they looked like they were governing when they passed the laws industries wanted, paid for the roads people wanted, and kept the economy at, at least, a mild simmer with Keynesian war-spending and Social Security.

Oh, sure, there were some troubling signs, such as their failure to save us $2 trillion over the past 40 years by legalizing drugs, or the fact that they couldn't enact taxes to pay for all the war spending. But that was, in a sense, the beauty of the thing- the money just kept rolling in and 2% of us became immeasurably wealthy.

But here we are now with a situation nobody expected- there aren't any more continents where we can "discover" natural resources, and all of our pointless (or worse) expense is hanging heavily on our shoulders in a lean and mean world economic environment.

The good news for people is that universal social services actually strengthen the body politic, so many nations do better at providing health care or education than we do. Whether the Congress will discover this in time for it to be good news for Americans remains a big question