When voters were asked to name the most important issue in the 2008 Election, they lied– they chose “the economy”. Apparently “electing the first African-American president,” “electing an inspirational president,” and “electing an intelligent president” were all unacceptable answers. I suppose hundreds of thousands of people gathered in Grant Park to cheer “Yes, we can!” with tears rolling down their eyes because of all the money they were about to make? Either that’s the completely reasonable account, or “the economy” was a perfectly pretentious and shallow gloss to throw over a hot-button topic like race. (I can’t seem to make up my mind on this one, choose your own reality.) Regardless, now that history has been made, we all have a chance to turn that little lie into something very good. With the economy continuing to flounder, we can begin caring for real and not just for political purposes or subterfuge. Allow me to propose three courses of action:

1)      Stop spending three-quarters of your income on crap that makes you feel like you’re in a science fiction movie. You don’t need it, it’s a waste of your resources, and as long as we keep making science fiction movies, you’ll never catch up anyway. Instead, take that money and put it towards stuff that actually matters. Now, before you start complaining that “stuff that actually matters” is very subjective, I’m going to inform you that you’re wrong and it’s not. Example: your portable cell phone/video camera/mp3 player/mini-van is just fine exactly the way it is and needs no upgrade. Instead of throwing money at Steve Jobs every year, so that you can add another “/” to the description, try walking into a charity and writing a check for the same amount of money you were going to spend on additional slashes. In economic terms, it’s a two-for-one special: Doing this will actually make you feel better, and it will make you less of a jackass at the same time. For those keeping track at home: Cell phone/video camera/mp3 player/mini-van– “stuff that does not matter”. Charity– “stuff that matters”.

2)      Remind Obama that, although we were all originally lying about electing him because of his economic acumen, we did bring up the subject to begin with, and now we’ve decided to follow through on it. Ask him to make good on his promise to both raise the minimum wage and work for the minimum wage himself, and, since we clearly have a personal relationship with the guy, let’s get him to initiate some laws that stop our politicians from spending enough money to feed every starving person in the world three times over in order to get elected to political office; that would be very pleasant and only a little ironic.

3)      Always do a third thing as well; it will be funny, and people will appreciate it, so long as you don’t mention that it’s supposed to be funny, or it hurts the economy.

America should be proud to have elected its first African-American president, a good man and an inspirational politician, but for a country that is supposedly concerned about economic stability, where’s the outrage over the economics of the political process itself? Anyone who believes that a three-year 750 million dollar campaign is a triumph for real progress or “change” should think about this simple equation: The person who spent the most money trying to get elected, won. Now wouldn’t it be nice to change that?