All Our Troubles Soon (and Best) Forgotten

Our elected representatives are frantically searching for scapegoats to blame -- and thus divert public attention from the government's responsibility -- for the two major factors that are dragging down the U.S. economy:

1. The soaring costs of energy. It is due to the failure of our government to adopt and implement a rational national energy policy. This failure also raises the cost of all of our domestic goods and services and thus imposes major burdens on every American household. Congress ignores the resulting hardships, the national security aspect of the problem and the fact that it makes us dependent on hostile powers. It responds by enacting measures that are merely symbolic or that tinker at the edges of the problem with measures such as the ethanol program that exacerbate the situation. So the self righteous politicians want us to blame "big oil" companies and/or "speculators."

2. The mortgage meltdown. It is the inevitable result of the government having pressured the nation's financial institutions for decades to make mortgage loans that the institutions never would have made on their own. The policy resulted in loans to borrowers who were not credit worthy and loans "secured" by mortgages on properties worth less than the amounts borrowed. This in turn led to building an excess supply of housing as well as the artificial inflation of housing prices to bubble levels. Local governments contributed to the escalation of housing costs by restricting and increasing the costs of construction within their jurisdictions. The targeted scapegoats here are "predatory lenders" and "greedy bankers" who took advantage of the situation to profit by doing exactly what pandering public officials pushed them to do.

What all this shows is that no situation is so bad that it cannot be made worse by the ignoramuses who comprise our legislative bodies. These dim bulbs do have one talent -- they know how and to whom to pander to get elected and reelected to power and positions at the public trough.