The change we voted for...

The change we voted for…
I keep hearing people talking about the change message of the Obama Campaign. What is most distressing is that a lot of times it is from people on the right. They use it as a pejorative like “is this the change you voted for?” and then they point to something like the unemployment numbers. I’ve tried to talk about this before, but I think it needs to be re-expressed. The government is broken up into city/local, state, and federal agencies. These are further separated into legislative, judicial, and executive sections. When you say government, what are you talking about? If you are talking taxes, what are you talking about? Do you live in a poor state, chances are you do, seeing as 48 of the states have been or are facing massive deficit. If you do then a lot is probably changing for you. You see most states unlike the federal government are not allowed to run deficits. This means any short falls necessitate a lot of change. Those changes include increase in taxes reduction of essential services and lots and lots of bad news. The same thing goes for city/local agencies. You’ll notice everything cost more “all of the sudden” and you naturally look to Obama, and say he’s changed everything. Well no, Government being as bureaucratic as it is, takes time to have its effect. The Cities and states are broke, because they didn’t get enough tax revenue, they didn’t get enough tax revenue, because people were out of work, people were out of work because banks stopped lending to businesses a year ago because they were afraid of collapse. All of these are effects of the global economic crisis, not, Obama policies. Many in fact argue that the Bush Tax cuts for the upper 5% devastatingly cut funds to the states, which makes sense considering the depth of the crisis. Blaming Obama for these things is like blaming the EMT that shows up to help a drive by victim, yeah he has blood on his hands but he’s trying to stop the bleeding. It doesn’t help that Congress can’t pass any laws unless every democrat votes to have a freaking vote, because every republican has agreed to not vote on any measure supported by this president. This means instead of having a democratic vote and having majority rule on legislation that the majority of the public agrees need to be done (i.e. health reform, climate reform, banking reform) requires every freakin’ democrat every freakin time. As a result things get watered down again and again. Look I’m not saying Obama is our flawless savior, for one thing having Larry Summers on his economic makes me nervous, and I’d like to have an end to our wars, what I am saying though is that finding solutions to our problems is important but it may be even more important to know what was the source of them, and in that regard I think people miss the mark widely when they point to Obama for these problems.