Motivation: low

I have to be honest: I'm thinking about quitting this blog.

It's never been a high-traffic source, so I know that it will be barely missed.  Oh, sure, I've gotten the occasional Instapundit link and I'd like to think I've added something to the conversation over ten years.  But I'm not in the mood to spend four more years griping about how Washington refuses to face up to fiscal reality.

Mark Steyn framed the fiscal problem today in "The Edge of the Abyss":

In the course of his first term, Obama increased the federal debt by just shy of $6 trillion and in return grew the economy by $905 billion. So, as Lance Roberts at Street Talk Live pointed out, in order to generate every dollar of economic growth the United States had to borrow about five dollars and 60 cents. There’s no one out there on the planet — whether it’s “the rich” or the Chinese — who can afford to carry on bankrolling that rate of return.

And he also framed the political problem:

So Washington cannot be saved from itself. For the moment, tend to your state, and county, town and school district, and demonstrate the virtues of responsible self-government at the local level. Americans as a whole have joined the rest of the Western world in voting themselves a lifestyle they are not willing to earn. The longer any course correction is postponed the more convulsive it will be. Alas, on Tuesday, the electorate opted to defer it for another four years. I doubt they’ll get that long.

There's a joke in one episode of "Futurama" where Bender tells a baldly obvious lie and another character responds: "I'd like to believe that were true.  So I do!"  The American people have been sold on the fiction that our unsustainable fiscal problems can be solved without a wrenching correction.

As Jake says in "The Sun Also Rises": "Isn't it pretty to think so?"