According to the International Herald Tribune , the Congressional Budget Office forecasts that the proposed budget will produce a $9.3 trillion deficit in the next decade... 4 to 5 percent of gross domestic product, as envisioned in the office's report, are "ultimately not sustainable."
Haase - Is this Change? or have we just stopped listening to reason?
Some answers... The more we 'change' the more we stay the same.
Why the Precautionary Principle should perhaps have trumped the Planck Problem, instead of vice versa... (proactive vs reactive)
From the campfire - Social scientist Jay Stuart Snelson calls this resistance an ideological immune system: "educated, intelligent, and successful adults rarely change their most fundamental presuppositions" According to Snelson, the more knowledge individuals have accumulated, and the more well-founded their theories have become (and remember, we all tend to look for and remember confirmatory evidence, not counterevidence), the greater the confidence in their ideologies. The consequence of this, however, is that we build up an "immunity" against ideas that do not corroborate previous ones. Historians of science call this the Planck Problem, after physicist Max Planck.
What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out and that the growing generation is familiarized with the idea from the beginning"
In a society assailed from all angles with social and environmental problems, and information available 24/7 on the internet to increasingly 'full' minds, we are moving further and further away from a cultural ability to say "I don't know". Such an answer implies weakness, rather than wisdom, and someone on TV, someone testifying to Congress, or someone publicly asked for answers to our financial or environmental problems replying "I don't know but I can find out and get back to you" would be quickly replaced by someone with a pithy, intelligent, or confident answer (with all three, they'd be branded an 'expert' and invited back).