Even If Romney Wins, The Country Is Still In Deep Trouble

Barack Obama is a singularly awful President.

He’s a ship captain taking an ax to the bottom of the boat after it hit a reef, a fireman dropping a full tank of gas in the middle a burning house, a child chasing the water out right before a tsunami.

That being said, as my friend Rachel Marsden notes in her column today, even if Obama loses next week, this country’s problems aren’t going to magically disappear.

* The economy is terrible and not on track to rapidly improve.
* The job market is awful.
* Housing prices haven’t recovered from their late 2008 crash and aren’t likely to do so any time soon.
* We have a 16 trillion dollar debt that we seem unlikely to be able to pay off in the lifetime of anyone reading this post.
* We’re running trillion dollar deficits, but BOTH PARTIES still seem to lack the will to make significant cuts (See the defense cuts for a great example of this).
* A European debt crisis seems likely to take place in the next few years and it will have a massive negative impact on the global economy.
* We’re still on track to have our own debt crisis that would likely create a new “Great Depression” here as it sends the worldwide economy into a death spiral.
* Obamacare is slated to take effect and destroy our medical system in 2014.
* Both Social Security and Medicare are extremely expensive, unsustainable, desperately in need of reform, but politically dangerous to touch.
* North Korea still has nuclear weapons and is likely to continue to spread the technology.
* Iran is still on track to get a nuclear weapon and if it does so, even in a best case scenario, it would cause a number of poor unstable nations in the region to acquire them as well.
* Al-Qaeda is still looking to kill Americans and with our still almost wide-open borders, it has access to our population centers.

The good news is that most of these are not unsolvable problems.

The bad news is that these are not QUICK, EASY, POPULAR problems to solve, but they are very easy to demagogue. Historically, problems like that don’t tend to be tackled in this country until there’s a crisis and then, as often as not, both parties cooperate to put in place an ill-thought-out solution that causes as many problems as it solves.

That’s where the country stands on the brink of the election and the only question is whether we’re going to elect Mitt Romney, who will hopefully start to tackle these issues, or whether Barack Obama is going to be allowed to spend another four years making the situation worse as the time we have to avert a crisis dwindles.

We’ll know soon enough.

Share this!

Enjoy reading? Share it with your friends!