Let's Get Real

The great deleveraging is upon us. According to some economists, the global slump we're currently in is a normal and necessary end stage to the bubble economy we floated on for too long. We still have a long way to fall before the deleveraging stops and we can start thinking about growth again, but one thing seems clear to me:It's time to get real.We consumed too much, borrowed too much, spent too much, deregulated too much, and generally let the forces of greed and short-sightedness run roughshod over common sense for too long. That paradigm is now dead--not because it was immoral but because there is no more hot hair left to fill all of those bubbles that made the paradigm possible. But I'm not hearing this painfully obvious fact from any of our elected leaders. They seem to soldier on blithely as if they could resurrect the housing bubble, solve unemployment through infrastructure projects, and spur growth by giving millionaires and billionaires even bigger tax breaks then they already have.Let's be clear about something. Government spending grew while tax rates shrank. This was sort of okay for a while because the growing economy meant even historically low tax rates were delivering lots of tasty revenue to the IRS. Of course those two wars were never paid for, nor the Bush era prescription drug plan. But then Republicans never believe the federal government should balance its budget until there's a Democrat in the White House. But bipartisan digs aside, what I would love to see is for someone, anyone, in either party, to deliver the actual truth to the American people, which is this:The next ten years are not going to look anything like the last ten years. The bubble may have been fun and it may have brought us all kinds of whiz bang things, but it's over now.I know. It's not the kind of platform that generally leads to electoral success, but maybe in this age of extreme cynicism about politics, the one who stands up and tells the harshest truth is the one the people start trusting.Or maybe we just have to trust ourselves. As the good (if unshowered) people of Occupy Wall Street say: "we're the ones we've been waiting for."