It's All My Fault!

So we have a new President. And one of the reasons this guy got in is because of blame. Everyone has to have someone to blame. Our economy is in deep trouble and someone must be at fault. So the majority of Americans blamed the current President. Our housing market is going belly up; it must be the fault of the current President. Credit card debt is out of control and may be the next financial sector that needs a federal buyout. It must be the fault of the current President. And that's why we have a new President from a difficult political party. A President whose beliefs and ideas of success are completely different and foreign to what we have now. Let's get rid of the bad guy.
There's just a couple of problems with that. Last time I checked, President Bush did not force us to buy our house. Neither did he hold a gun to our heads and force us to use credit cards.
We have such short term memory, we seem to forget that the economy crunch did not start and finish in the month of October. The housing problem did not come to a head in October. That's just when we saw the end of what had been a very long history of making bad decisions. President Bush did not make all those bad decisions. He didn't chose to buy houses we couldn't afford with loans banks had no business making in a series of deals that had no chance of succeeding.

We have the new President that we have because we no longer have individual responsibility.

Bad things happen sometimes. And they often happen as a result of bad or un-informed decisions on our part. But somehow we've decided as a nation that we should not have to bear the results of our decisions. Government is going to be the doting parent that bails us out every time we get in over our heads. No one seems to realize that government gets its money from our pockets. Instead of bracing ourselves, tightening our belts and getting ourselves out of the mess that we're in, we've decided to let government do it for us. Never mind that their way is not the best way. Or the most responsible way. Or even a complete solution to all the problems surrounding us. Government will take care of it.

That's the attitude that put Obama in the White House. And now, finally, we're going to have to reap the results of our decisions. Oh, no one sees that now, of course. But a few years from now we'll all be feeling the pinch. Including the people that don't own houses and think that somehow Obama will fix it so we don't have to pay for the gas we put into our tanks.

I'm praying that it's only a pinch we're feeling and not a chokehold that squeezes the life out of an entire country. I pray we can recover from this most dangerous decision of all.