Future's so bright we have to wear shades

[Valin]

USA Today

 

The big bureaucracies won't vanish -- they'll just become smaller and less significant.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds

5/20/13

 

The current scene doesn't look so great. We've got the Benghazi scandal, which Bob Woodward has compared to Watergate, we've got the IRS scandal, where Democratic members of Congress are saying the IRS director lied, we've got the FBI AP-snooping scandal, we've got the HHS "private donation" shakedown scandal, and, of course, there's the still-unfolding Pigford scandal that has funneled billions to grifters. It seems like [url=http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/how-the-scandals-turned-obama-into-a-dour-scold-20130516everything is in tatters. And, in a way, it is.

 

But serious as these problems are, they're all short-term things. So while at the moment a lot of our political leaders may be wearing sunglasses so as not to be recognized, there's a pretty good argument that, over the longer time, our future's so bright that we have to wear shades.

 

That's the thesis of a new book, America 3.0: Rebooting American Prosperity In The 21st Century. The book's authors, James Bennett and Michael Lotus, argue that things seem rough because we're in a period of transition, like those after the Civil War and during the New Deal era. Such transitions are necessarily bumpy, but once they're navigated the country comes back stronger than ever.

(Snip)