We, the people................

Megan McArdle suggests:

The first, most glaring problem is that people complaining about Washington are quite often demanding the impossible.

1. They want Washington to grow the economy or the job market a lot, which no one in Washington actually knows how to do.
2. They want Washington to collect less in taxes, without cutting any significant programs or borrowing money. (Or they want more programs, with taxes to stay the same on everyone except “the rich,” conveniently defined as anyone who makes 20 percent more than the person issuing the demands.)
3. They want Washington make all the other countries in the world behave themselves, without getting any Americans killed in the process.
4. They want Washington to ignore most of the rest of the country and just concentrate on their problems, and the problems of people they like.

Washingtonians, unlike the people making the demands, actually have to analyze the feasibility of these various sorts of requests. When they do, they quickly see that they are impossible, and set about finding innovative ways to ignore them.

Or, as our old friend Walt Kelly would say: