As long as it keeps working

Dear Editor,
The news room reports that our own venerated ex-Senator Al Simpson, along with 44 other ex-Senators, has joined forces to clean up the dangerous mess that we, the electorate, have enthroned in Washington. One cannot report or even imagine how we, the electorate, came to be bemused with barroom braggadocio and back alley bacchanalia. My best guess, and it’s only a guess, is that we wanted to believe our personal state of affairs was caused by somebody else. And, any alternative was even worse.
That “make believe” story couldn’t be any further from reality. As regular as the seasons we hear that “big tax cuts” are coming to cure all ailments! Once you really believe, you can always find new evidence to support and reinforce your beliefs. Big tax cuts do come, but only for our 0ligarchs, the ‘one percent’ at the very top of our economic ladder. Those tax cuts are are quickly escorted to some off-shore hidey-hole, never to be seen again!  
Government spending goes on and on. No tax comes in to pay those bills!  Egad! The deficit is growing larger!  Quick, cut spending, cut entitlements — like Social Security, like Medicare and Medicaid, like Unemployment Insurance, like funding the NIH, like cut off our nose to spite our face.   
It is the old carnival bait and switch con-game. They do it because it works!  It has been working for a long time.  As long as we keep believing the story that social benefits are a “rip-off,” we will continue to be blind-sided and we are the self-selected victims.
—Jerry Baird