Most of what's wrong with the economy is not ideological, it has to do with historical conditions and developments, and decisions made a long time ago that seemed like perfectly good ideas at the time. The global recession is, after all, global.

But if Mr Romney gets elected, and he cannot stop or reverse the economic decline, I doubt he or his followers will refrain from blaming it all on Obama. "The Liberals left us such a mess not even we could fix it". Or they would simply claim they "were able to prevent the Obama recession from getting any worse". Sound familiar?

Whoever wins, we will not have the alternate reality to compare to to determine whether he saved us from disaster, or simply made things worse.

Out basic problem is that we seem to think that we can run the nation (and the world) by selling each other pizza and giving each other haircuts. We have an unsustainable consumer economy based on the promise of constant future growth, reliant on the creation and consumption of goods and services that are primarily expected to create jobs that enable people to buy even more goods and services next year, which will create more jobs. Its a vicious circle that only works because of easy credit and cheap natural resources. Well guess what, we're running out of both, aren't we?

When I was a kid I used to ask people why we changed the car models every year, and why were they always getting bigger and faster and shinier. I was told "it keeps people working". I suspected there was a problem with this when I was ten years old. Ten years later, there was no doubt in mind. This basic fallacy is not just Republican. The Democrats believe it too. In fact, they invented it.

The reason I vote Democrat is not because I think they have any answers. I just believe they are more likely to allow some of the wealth to trickle down, people will get some benefit, some comfort, some relief. I got education, it was my way out. (They "pandered" to me.)

But if the Democrats don't have any solutions, the Republicans don't believe there's a problem. I don't think that they care what happens, as long as they're safe.