Intelligence Recession

John is watching I.O.U.S.A. on TV and it is making me want to write something that I've been thinking of for awhile. So right now we are supposedly in a "recession", as in the economy isn't doing as well as it used to be. To get out of this we've got our wonderfully smart politicians to save us by borrowing enormous amounts of money and spending it. I don't care if you are red or blue here that is pretty much every one's solution and it only really differs on what it gets spent on.

Well, I kinda have a problem with this assessment, what everyone thinks we can "do" about it, and how we got here in the first place. My basic premise is this and I am not going to do any funky math because I think it is just going to obscure my points.

1. Since the early 1990s the country has been living on debt in the form of loans and credit cards. We've all heard the numbers from time to time about how much debt people are holding and how there is negative savings for people.
2. We all have heard of or know about people that have lived well beyond their means on said debt trying to keep up with the Jones'.
3. Our own country has been living on borrowed money and outspending its means. Furthermore, our government has in fact encouraged reckless consumer behaviour over the last 15-ish years if not more to "keep the economy going" by spending, keeping home interest rates absurdly low when they shouldn't have been, and not bothering to regulate or even just plain enforce the current economic regulations.
4. So now our house of cards has fallen, people are at least pretending to understand the idiocy of the excessive spending and may in fact be living within their means.
5. If people are in fact now living within their means for whatever reasons, THIS IS THE NORMAL STATE OF THE ECONOMY. Our economy was operating on an artificial high through borrowed cash or credit which means this isn't a recession, it's a reset.
6. All the new spending on whatever government program (again red or blue) to reinvigorate the economy is essentially throwing money down a hole. If our economy is right-sized now (my words) because people have stopped spending on the margins and credit, we can't exactly regain that fake economy no matter how much the government borrows and we have to pay back with interest later.

So forgive me for being a little but of a downer about all this, but I'm in the generation that gets to pay for all this junk in the future and my retirement age is increasing by the minute (or dollar spent). So if you want my opinion on what we should do, and do you really expect that I don't have one, start slashing the federal budget so that if is actually in the black. If we are going to borrow money, then I think it should all go straight to either research and development programs (in any arena NASA, energy, biology, anything that could drive the cutting edge) and maybe infrastructure. R&D is real trickle down economics, you pay a whole lot of white collar educated people salaries, which drive the need for education, housing, and every other service industry to support the base. Money spent on R&D is all money that stays in the country and actually works to develop some real "thing" which advances the country and helps keep us on top.

That's it, that's what I think. So in my pessimistic opinion, get used to it, because this is reality. But please don't start spending on credit, it was never a smart thing to do in the first place.