Behold the triumphant roar of the American economic engine, which, much like a Victorian steam boiler held together by rusted rivets and the collective delusions of a panicked citizenry, is apparently set to 'accelerate.' The experts—those credentialed shamans of the dismal science who couldn’t predict a sunrise if they were standing on Mercury—have decreed that a 'monetary-fiscal loosening' is upon us. It is a phrase so clinically sterile, so devoid of human consequence, that it almost successfully hides the reality of what it describes: a desperate, drug-addled lurch toward the nearest available cliff.

Let’s deconstruct the 'loosening,' shall we? In the realm of monetary policy, the Federal Reserve is preparing to do what it always does when the withdrawal symptoms of cheap credit start making the stock market jittery: it’s reaching for the needle. By lowering interest rates, the Fed is essentially telling a nation of debt-laden locusts that the banquet isn’t over, despite the fact that the kitchen is on fire, the pantry is empty, and the chef has been dead for weeks. The Right will scream about inflation while simultaneously demanding the very rate cuts that fuel it, because their only consistent ideology is 'make the line go up until I can sell my shares and retreat to a gated community.' Meanwhile, the Left will cheer for the stimulus, convinced that if we just print enough digits on a screen, we can finally solve the fundamental laws of thermodynamics and provide a subsidized utopia where nobody has to do anything more strenuous than post a black square on Instagram or lecture their plumber on intersectionality.

Then there is the 'fiscal' side of this loosening. This is the part where the government—a collection of octogenarians who think 'the cloud' is a literal weather phenomenon—decides to spend trillions more dollars it doesn’t actually possess. It’s a bipartisan orgy of incompetence that would be comical if it weren't so pathologically destructive. Whether the money is being funneled into defense contracts for drones that don’t work in the rain or 'green initiatives' that primarily benefit the private equity firms of well-connected donors, the result is the same: the terminal devaluation of the currency and the slow-motion collapse of what remains of the American middle class. We are watching a nation try to spend its way out of debt, which is like trying to drink yourself sober. It is a spectacle of such profound, unalloyed idiocy that one wonders if the water supply in Washington D.C. hasn't been replaced with pure lead.

But why now? The timing is predictable. The election cycle is a hungry, primitive god that demands a sacrifice of reality. The incumbents need the numbers to look 'good'—or at least 'not immediately fatal'—long enough for the voters to stumble into the booths. It’s a temporary acceleration, a final, violent burst of speed from a dying star before it collapses into a black hole of stagflation and civil unrest. The 'acceleration' isn't progress; it's gravity. It’s the speed you pick up when you’re in freefall, and the 'loosening' is just the sensation of the safety harness finally snapping.

The Left presents themselves as the compassionate architects of a fairer society, but their version of 'loosening' is merely a bureaucratic expansion where 'equity' is a buzzword used to mask the transfer of wealth to non-profit industrial complexes and administrative bloat. They want to spend your grandchildren's wages on programs designed to make them feel better about their own privilege while changing absolutely nothing about the underlying power structures that keep them comfortable. On the flip side, the Right’s 'greed is good' mantra has devolved into a moronic fetishization of the 'free market'—a market that hasn't been 'free' since the first time a bank was deemed 'too big to fail' and bailed out with public funds. They worship at the altar of deregulation while begging for government subsidies for their failing industries. They are two heads of the same parasite, arguing over which part of the host to drain first.

And the public? They lap it up. The average American is so economically illiterate they think 'GDP growth' is something you can spread on a cracker. They celebrate the 'loosening' because it means they might be able to afford a slightly larger television to watch the world burn in high definition. They are the passengers on the Titanic who, upon seeing the iceberg, decide it’s a great time to ask for more ice in their drinks. There is only the frantic, sweaty maintenance of a status quo that has been rotting since the gold standard was tossed into the dustbin of history. So, let us celebrate the acceleration. Let us cheer as the gears of the Great Republic grind against one another, throwing sparks that will eventually ignite the whole rotten structure. The monetary-fiscal loosening is here, and it’s the only honest thing the government has done in decades: it’s finally letting go of the pretense that any of this is sustainable. It’s a race to the bottom, and for once, America is actually going to win.