Dear James, Daniel and Emily,
I finally did it! I broke the 180 barrier and plateau I was stuck on. I can only point to being so focused on the house projects the past couple of days that I didn't have time to laze around snacking. Proof positive that idle hands are not necessarily a good thing.
So I got started thinking about that, and how people ask me how I made this change, and how to extrapolate what I did to the political arena. The harsh reality of weight loss is this: there really are no quick fixes to healthy wieght loss. I have known more than a few people who have dropped significant weight in a short time, but in almost every case it was either with the use of chemistry (legal or otherwise) or massive stress. In either case there was a good chance that they could return to their former weight once the extra factor was removed (stop taking drugs, remove source of stress). Once again, the formula is dead simple: reduce calorie intake + increase calorie burn. But the deceptive part of that is the only way to keep that going is a change in lifestyle. Once you stop the boot camp exercise (if that is what you do) or stop starving yourself it is easy to regain the pounds. I know this from experience from a few previous stabs at weight loss.
What does all this have to do with politics you ask? Well if you look at government spending of all kinds as eating, and then exercise as taxes it becomes more clear. The problem is that our political culture is that we tend to overeat (spend and spend, engage in unending wars, dealing with disasters etc.) without exercising (low taxes meaning less productive income to offset that spending). So we get fat (vast deficits) or starve to death (enforced balanced budgets when there's no revenue to maintain any adequate levels of spending). Our current political culture no more understands that government does need to balance income and spending, than most people inherently understand the balance of calorie intake versus calorie burn.
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