By James Fallows – James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and has written for the magazine since the late 1970s. He has reported extensively from outside the United States, and once worked as President Carter’s chief speechwriter. His latest book, China Airborne, will be published in May.

My Comment: This comes courtesy of my cousin, Steve Saker. As we listen to the blather on TV and radio from the various political camps, there is a tendency to forget history and the adage that if you do, it will simply repeat itself. And underlying all the blather is a fundamental misunderstanding of the economic framework that made us successful.

Simply put, life does not move in a straight line. There are ups and there are downs, and your responses to the different forces at work have to be different. Right now people are saying we are heading for a disaster, that what we are doing is not sustainable. I submit that overcompensating will cause us to lose traction and we’ll slide off the road into the trees.

Here’s the first paragraph: Some day people will look back in puzzlement at the prevailing U.S. mood of 2011, when in the face of the biggest job-loss collapse in two generations the prevailing rhetoric from Democrats and Republicans alike emphasized the need to cut public spending, now. (And, yes, it should have been seen as puzzling and self-destructive at the time.)

Read the rest of it HERE…