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That is simply not true, and another example of voters (namely, you) evading their own responsibilities. There have been many candidates for office willing to tell the voters the blunt truth and what needs to be done. Many have even been well-funded. Unfortunately, voters have consistently rejected them. To be perfectly blunt, attitudes such as yours are a prime reason this great democratic experiment is mired in economic morass. You aren't the solution, you are the problem.
Until we can actually have qualified "voters", "we" are doomed to repeat the same mistakes for generations to come. In a perfect world, only those with some "skin in the game" would be afforded the privilege of voting. Either verifiable income and employment, a property owner, etc... Absolutely no public sector employee would be given the right to vote as this is the BIG problem. As the percentage of job growth in the past two decades emerged from the public sector, it only stands to reason that these voters will continually vote for even more government and more spending. And lastly, as controversial as it may seem, I'm not that crazy about giving women the right to vote either. The percentage of women that I've ever met that will vote based upon a candidate's political platform is probably about 10%. The vast majority will vote upon not just the candidate's appearance, but also the candidate's stance on all of the "fringe issues" that have absolutely no business being a part of the national dialogue.
This is exactly right. Voters always claim they "hate congress", but they continually love THEIR congressman and show it by re-electing them at a very high rate. They claim they hate career politicians, yet elect career politicos 98% of the time. They claim they want straight talk, but ALWAYS punish the candidates that deliver the hard truth. The bottom line is that we get what we deserve in the country, 100% of the time.
My point is our standard of living will average to the levels of our trading partners. The water analogy... everything will find its level.
I was talking to a Tea Party gal today and she said something that sort of gave me food for thought. She said "we don't have Socialism, we have Communism".. I'm not sure what we have exactly.. We have the ACLU types remaking the culture from the inside out via the legal system and via legal extortion/thuggery, we have the Democrat Party requiring large donations from people that want jobs in the Public Sector, we have a level of political debate that resembles a street brawl, we have two parties both of which are busy taking away our constitutional rights, we have the Federal Reserve printing our money, we have an income tax that was struck down by the Supreme Court but reinstated by a LOWER court, we have the best politicians that money can buy and many of them are flagrantly getting away with things that the press just doesn't investigate... we have an educational system that enforces paganism... I really don't know what we have..
It's called controlled opposition. A two party system gives the voters literally no options. If the system were reformed in any meaningful way and alternative parties were to emerge, I think that we'd see a vastly different political landscape. Currently, it's near impossible for an outside party to raise the sort of funding needed to take on the embedded politico's who have guaranteed special interest funding. What we have is the "best system that money can buy".