The Day after Tomorrow: Why This Election Won’t Change Anything

There is a tremendous amount of excitement and exuberance about the American elections tomorrow, but the trends, and recent history in particular, indicate that this excitement is perhaps undeserved. Over the last half century, the United States government has become less and less capable of actually governing the country and doing things, and there is no better example of the trend in action than what the last two years of divided government have produced. Of course, these are just empty assertions without evidence, but evidence we have indeed.

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Misconceptions: “The Election is a Dead Heat”

I’m not one to get mired in election cycle coverage often, but then I saw “news” stories like this one claiming that the presidential election is actually close. This is not true. Barack Obama is almost certainly going to win this election, and his margin in the electoral college is probably going to be more than a couple of states large. Here’s why.

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Romney and Disaster Relief

In the wake of the recent hurricane, new attention is being paid to this clip from the primary debates in which Romney condemns federal funding for disaster relief:

While the hurricane has drawn attention to this quip, its intellectual value, positively or negatively, is independent of this particular situation and deserves to be judged on its own merits, and that is precisely what today’s post is all about–the merits of the notion that the federal government should do less.

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Misconceptions: “Obama has Vastly Increased the Size of the Government”

It is a commonly held belief that the Obama administration has been spending money all over the place, increasing the size of the government and the number of people it employs. There is a bit of a problem with this, though–it is factually inaccurate. Today I intend to illustrate and prove that this belief is not in line with reality.

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The Political Pitfalls of Pessimism and Optimism

In the United States, we are often exhorted to be optimistic, enthusiastic, and positive about our society and one another, criticising “constructively” or perhaps preferably not at all. The United States has a particularly optimistic political culture, one where you really can make your campaign slogan “hope”, “change”, or “yes we can” and get away with it. The United Kingdom is quite a different place–in Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron got into office with the slogan “we can’t go on like this”. There’s a “change” message in there somewhere, but it certainly isn’t phrased in hopeful terms. Today I’d like to have a closer look at the role optimism and pessimism play in the American and British political systems, respectively, discovering how both extremes can have a deleterious effect on government.

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