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My opponents have argued that by cutting spending during this time of strife, our government would be repeating the same mistakes it made in the 1930s. My opponents have claimed that such cuts would plunge us into a tortured era of misery and severely damage our economy, leaving it in a battered state from which it would take years to recover. My opponents are absolutely correct.
But maybe the economy would be into that kind of thing.
It certainly wouldn’t hurt to ask. We must take seriously the possibility that more severe spending cuts could hurt our economy so good. A sharp fiscal tightening on the part of the government might shake the economy up in a way that it actually enjoys. Pundits complain about how the economy is caught in an irreversible bind, but I can tell that secretly it sort of likes it. Sometimes economies can be kinky like that.
Our lawmakers are sucking at the corporate teat, but they must go further. They must dig their nails deep into the economic love handles, they must nibble on the financial earlobe and they must give hickey after hickey to the commercial neck. Our lawmakers must remain fully committed to these goals. Even when the economy cries out in pain and asks them to stop, our lawmakers must grunt like animals and continue their sexy behavior, with one exception: if the economy says the safe word, ‘raincoat,’ only then must our lawmakers stop.
Wall Street traders have flouted the law. They have destabilized the financial system in ways that were not just foolhardy but downright criminal. And yet the fact that these actions are forbidden only makes them that much more erotic to the economy. It wants to be irresponsible. It wants to lose control. Make no mistake: the economy’s hidden passions are dangerous, and sooner or later average hardworking American families are going to start feeling the backlash. Aw yeah they are.
I want you to imagine an America in which our government fails to provide even the most basic public services to citizens. Education is entirely privatized, Social Security gone, our public transportation system in disrepair. Now imagine that out of the bleak mire emerges a sexy corporate giant. It shoves the economy harshly to the ground with its mighty invisible hand and begins whipping, whipping, mad with power, bending the economy to its primal corporate will. Now you have imagined what our economy daydreams about every minute of every day.
We are at a critical moment in history, a moment in which we wield great power over the future, and you know the future is loving it. Oh yeah. You know the future’s got that weird kinky thing for being completely and utterly dominated by the caprice and folly of the present.
Were we to slash funding for key government services like Medicare and Social Security, we would hear an uproar from America’s middle and lower classes. This would slowly build into a loud public outcry over rapidly deteriorating living conditions. But almost without realizing it, their screams of pain would become moans of pure pleasure. Writhing in ecstasy, they would turn to the politicians who betrayed them and ask for more, more!
Afterward, there’d be several fiscal quarters of heavy breathing, the economy’s heart still racing, its chest rising and falling as one with the chests of the American public, the stock market and the United States Congress. Then at last the economy would feel a pain, such a sweet and full pain that it would forget about the past and not care about the future, such an incredible pain that the economy would just want to stretch itself supine, back arched sea to sea across our great nation, and wince, if only it could stop smiling.
