“Fuckin’ A!”

In every election since Clinton/Dole in 1996 I’ve written a Nobody for President post. Clinton/Dole was probably the most egregious example of the need for voting nobody in all of the elections I’ve paid attention to; since that election, our increasingly partisan political atmosphere has provided more choice in our elections. In 2000, I could still write that it made sense for far left voters, for example, to hand the election to George Bush by voting Nader—because it did make sense. And the extreme left did exactly that, leading directly, in my opinion, to their having a candidate to vote for in 2008 in President Obama. They showed that their vote mattered.

For the most part, the fiscally-conservative right did not listen to the same message in 2008; rather than voting Nobody they stayed home. Democrats were empowered to pass the cronyism appreciation spending bill of 2009 and Republicans didn’t see any benefit in stopping that bill, which might as well have been called the “delay the recovery act of 2009”.

The cronyism appreciation act delayed the recovery just long enough to kill it in early 2010, when Democrats, still empowered by 2008, passed the job-killing mass of unreadable regulations now called Obamacare. Republicans made a show of stopping it but gave in over Christmas of 2009; it wasn’t until a Republican won to replace Ted Kennedy in Massachusetts on a platform that included voting against Obamacare that Republicans realized there were votes to be had; but by then it was too late; it had passed both houses of congress and was enacted in reconciliation.

The voters who stayed home in 2008 learned, however, and in 2010 they came out in a wave in both the primaries to create real choices and in the general to elect those choices.

It is now very likely that we’re looking at a double-dip recession¹ because of economically-insane and fiscally-insane laws passed under Barack Obama. A recession that should have been over in a year was prolonged through massively increasing the federal debt, putting the federal government rather than consumers in charge of deciding which businesses succeed and which fail—except that the federal government has been so inept at choosing which cronies to help that even with millions of dollars of tax money their choices tend to fail anyway. Even when their choices limp along like GM, it still stalls business recovery by blocking new and better businesses with new and better jobs from taking their place and expanding our economy into the future.

And if the federal government propping up the old boys network doesn’t keep new businesses from starting, the massive regulations such as from Obamacare do.

Thus, four years later, a one-year recession still shows few signs of abating and many signs of worsening.²

What can we expect a Romney administration to focus on?

1. Loosing the coiled spring of our economy from the incomprehensible and massive regulations that have been holding it back.
2. This will include a massive simplification of our tax code—one that will be labeled revenue neutral, but because it frees companies and people to focus on their core activities rather than on navigating our incomprehensible tax code will in fact increase tax revenues.

That’s really all we really need. Every single past recession and depression has responded best to just getting the government out of the way. Most of them we don’t even remember—who even thinks of the recession of 1920 or the recession of 2000? Even the Great Depression, often used as an example of why we need government action to get out of a depression, lasted for over a decade of federal intervention under both Hoover and Roosevelt, until the federal government turned its attention overseas in World War II. The United States started to slip back into recession as the war wound down in 1945; in that year, however, the federal response was to cut taxes on both individuals and corporations, and we rarely hear about the recession of 1945 either.

If the only thing a Romney administration does³ is take the federal thumb off of the economy, we will finally recover.