Ash, you do have the luxury of actual current events to spin off your clever mischaracterizations, but let me just respond to your basic thesis ”everything is horrible” by asking, compared to what?

Compared to the time your theories were actually tested?

That would be 1975-80, wouldn’t it? The span between the US Congress cutting off aid to embattled ally South Vietnam and the election of Ronald Reagan? The five years when millions of people went into graveyards from SE Asia to Afghanistan to Africa to Central America, and USA’s unemployment was around double what it is now, with interest rates and inflation three or four times what they are now? When evaporating equity in a contracting economy in a nation about as miserable and demoralized as it has ever been in its history (even more so than in the depression as this time the USSR was on the march to the Persian Gulf) made “Disco Duck” the #1 Top 40 hit ?

Yep, had the Ash party won that 1980 election, you wouldn’t be complaining about the current economy (suffering temporarily from too much easy money but after two decades of solid growth) because instead of breezily launching blue-sky jibes on your computer, you’d be outside digging the supper potatoes. Or izzat potatos.