The counterfactual is a beautiful thing…. You can forever go there when all evidence suggests you’ve screwed up…
You’re late for your daughter’s wedding… Good thing… If you left on time you would have been in a horrible accident… It was divine intervention…
You lost your metalworks job two years ago… Cool… If you hadn’t been laid off, an anvil would’ve fallen on your head… And besides, you wouldn’t be kicking back on unemployment for another year…
Trillions of taxpayer-funded stimulus over the past two years and we sit atop a 9.2% unemployment rate and a limping economy… Of course that’s great compared to where we’d be without all the government intervention… Or so say the sympathizers…
And I do recall/confess (alas) that that’s precisely what conservatives were saying two years (and no jobs) after the end of the ’02 recession..
Seven years older, and hopefully wiser, I believe I see the folly in fiscal and monetary policy-wielders thinking they can fix a wannabe free-market economy… Directionally speaking (spending-wise) there’s no distinguishing the current administration from the last (both Keynesian all the way)… In terms of velocity however, the current admin has had its pedal to the metal… But who knows, maybe, under the circumstances, the previous admin would’ve been worse… They certainly had it in them…
We gotta vote smarter my friends!!