Hardship in the USA

. American politicians have always been afraid of the Great American Public, and its reluctance to even contemplate any sort of hardship. Left-leaning politicians especially, realize too late, once they get elected, in times of difficulty usually, that they can’t ask their constituents to tighten their belts even to the degree they foresaw when campaigning. All the programs they put forward as part of their manifesto depend on a certain amount of suffering, but it invariably turns out that their party and those who voted for them are called to suffer even more than planned, because this country does not believe in uniform suffering for everybody. Hey, say the Others, you elected these people in, and you knew there was going to be suffering, so you suffer; leave us out of it. The sophisticated economics that has arisen in the last several decades is based on the (according to the economists, the natural human desire to seek the) avoidance of hardship. As one commentator on NPR put it: the American public has come to demand good highways, jobs, Social Security for seniors, Welfare for the indigent, good, safe Airports, a strong Armed Forces, but without actually paying for any of it. So any government that goes along with the desire to not pay for anything eventually stays popular with the majority of the electorate (except for the few who insist on balancing the budget), while a government that attempts to balance budgets eventually becomes unpopular, at least among the majority of taxpayers. President Obama and his White House is coming under criticism from the Left, which had predicted that he would sell out to Big Business and the Insurance and Medical Services lobbies. He is coming under criticism from the Right, because he keeps saying that he wants to push through financial reform, stop the war, and reform health care, though he compromises at every turn. The Right has little cause to complain; the Bailouts helped mostly the friends of Conservatives. The failure of health reform is in the interests of all the shareholders of the Big Health Insurance companies. Obama, however, is a smart fellow, and there are lots of brains in the Democratic party which may come to the aid of his administration. No matter what the geniuses dream up, if there is no hardship for the next several years for everyone, the very poorest --now unemployed, and without health care or health insurance-- will suffer the most, while the rest of us look on with pity. So let us hope as hard as we can that rather than terrible hardship for a few, that there will be moderate hardship for all of us, and let’s be prepared to battle the “No hardship for anyone, please, least of all for me” gang in the next elections. If they have their way, you just know that hardship is only postponed, not eliminated. Historically it has been effectively kept offshore, in Mexico, Latin America, China, the places where people usually worked for low wages to enable us to enjoy cheap consumer items. Pretty soon they’re going to get hip to the inequity of the partnership.