Parody: Elect the willfully ignorant

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

I have previously posted about the willfully ignorant on the right, and now there is a new video! Unfortunately, this describes more than half of the Arizona Legislature — and the voters who elect them.

UPDATE: Steven Pearlstein writing for the Washington Post makes the point. Democrats suffer from Americans' unwillingness to accept economic reality:

The dirty little secret is that most Americans don't really know what they think about the issues that so animate the political conversation in Washington, and what they think they know about them is often wrong.

Most Americans still think that the bailouts of the banks, the auto companies and American International Group will wind up costing taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars. In fact, the latest guess is that the government will come out even on the deal, and may even turn a profit.

Many Americans think that the economic stimulus package has been a failure. In fact, the estimates from a wide range of experts say the stimulus has saved or created more than 3 million jobs.

Many Americans believe their federal taxes have gone up in the past two years. In fact, for 90 percent of households, taxes were temporarily cut.

After the headlines of the past few weeks, most Americans probably think government has been able to do little, if anything to stem the tidal wave of foreclosures. In fact, over the past 18 months, two mortgages have been modified to avoid foreclosure for every completed foreclosure.

Oh, yes, and then there is the budget deficit, which many Americans think is out of control because of runaway spending orchestrated by President Obama and the Democratic Congress. That deficit, in turn, is blamed for the lackluster economy.

In fact, the deficit has nothing to do with today's slow growth and high unemployment. Indeed, many economists, including those at the International Monetary Fund, think that increasing the deficit even further would be a good way to reduce unemployment in the short term.

And who is responsible for this year's record federal deficit? Roughly half of it was already baked into the cake by the time Obama came into office, with another quarter coming from the "automatic stabilizers" that reduce tax collections and increase spending on things like unemployment insurance and food stamps when the economy is in recession. The rest comes from the one-time stimulus which, once it runs its course, will leave a "structural deficit" that is no bigger than it was when George W. Bush left office.

The simple truth is that Obama and the Democratic Congress were dealt a lousy economic hand, and they've played it about as well as anyone could… [T]hey prevented a collapse of the global financial system and a 1930s-like depression. But given the magnitude of the financial crisis and the global imbalances that gave rise to it, a prolonged period of slow growth and high unemployment was almost inevitable.

The political reality, however, is that voters are unwilling to accept that economic reality. They want to believe that government has the power to control the economy and fix it quickly when it breaks down. They are encouraged in that belief by politicians and special interest groups, by the media and by too many economists.