"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."

For eight years, the economy was all about conservative ideology. At least that's what I was constantly hearing here. What's changed? Suddenly economic failure is an "act of God" or something?

Of course it's "ideological." There are specific and known sets of ideas that result in economic growth, and known sets of ideas that result in economic failure. It doesn't take a professor of philosophy to see this. Sheer empirical observation is enough, as we see from watching decades of people voting with their feet.

You want to talk about "decisions made a long time ago that seemed like good ideas at the time?" Look at the hard numbers on what's dragging the Federal government down fiscally and ask yourself if you really want to go there. Do we need to go over "unfunded liabilities" yet again?

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.

Why would this be any less valid than the endless excuses we've been hearing since Obama was elected? Bush has been walking around with "the buck" for three and a half years now.

The deficit now is three times what it was when liberals were howling about Bush's "un-American" deficits. More will be added to the debt in Obama's four years than Bush added in eight, and Bush added a lot. Unemployment has hung at 8 percent and above for 42 months, the longest run since the Depression. Back when the same kind of ideas Obama is pushing held unemployment in double digits for a decade. Remember when unemployment rates below 5 percent was "the worst economy ever?" I do.

What fantasies and excuses are liberals going to concoct if ideas like free markets and limited government actually start to work?

Romney is not going to "fix the economy." What can happen, with luck, is that the president and Senate will stop blocking things that will fix the economy. Want things to start working again? "Get the hell out of the way."