Midterm massacre a good thing? Um, if you like backward momentum

I like my buying libido nice and low; I like my gas prices high, my 401(k) in the toilet, my taxes going to unemployment checks and welfare programs.

The price at the pump, the state of the stock market and the unemployment rate all affect consumer confidence, the cornerstone of economic indicators and a snapshot of national financial health.

When they are good, consumer confidence is high and the average Joe, Jane, Juan and Juanita can put on their dancing shoes, loosen up the purse strings and begin to party and spend like it’s 1999 — the economic year, that is, where the longest peacetime expansion of unchecked economic growth occurred since the 1980s.

Unfortunately we are heading back in that positive direction today, but hopefully the midterm elections have put a stop to all that; flat is where it’s at, and the worser the better.

By most conventional measures — measures that any so-called allegedly rational human being would consult — the country is on the mend in almost every category to be counted, and the Democratic administration of the last six years under President Obama has been at the helm.

That simply cannot happen, and for that reason the Democrats in Congress and the balance between the power of the House and the Senate just had to go.

Success is in the eye of the beholder, and what America beholds at the moment is Obama’s Cheese Touch. Pulled from the pages of the “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” books, the “Cheese Touch” is the toxic association with something or someone deemed evil at worst and unpopular at best.

Like many registered Democrats around the country, I thought about staying home last week and not voting at all, and I realize many of us did that. But if you don’t vote, you can’t complain, so complain we Dems did, using the Cheese Touch as our guide, disavowing any prior knowledge of the President’s party.

We’ll see how that works out considering the last midterm upheaval (2010) in favor of conservative candidates essentially laid out a roadmap for a Democratic return to the White House.

It will be different this time, though, as our chosen leaders will hopefully neuter Obamacare, with its 10 million enrollees, 80 percent to 85 percent of whom are paying their insurance premiums and many of whom are healthy, not simply ill people forcing a spike in insurance rates.

Hopefully we can enter back into a full-scale war with no exit strategy in the immediate future, as many of the new lawmakers need to help out-of-work private contractors for war profits.

Maybe the new Congress can do something to raise gas prices and buck this 2015 forecast of gas prices under $3 on average, a trend set in motion over the last year.

If all goes according to plan, I’d like to see two years’ worth of monthly consecutive job growth end, the creation of 4 million private sector jobs ramp down and the stock market have a minor crash or two to make things interesting.

We need some more tax cuts for the nation’s richest because the historic wealth disparity now upon us isn’t historic enough.

That should mean more low-wage jobs, as more millionaires will need nannies, maids, landscapers and hand servants, but I’m sure we’ll be able to find those bodies from the shrinking middle class.

It’s time to return to the golden years of GOP national deficits that topped out at $1.4 trillion under George W. Bush. He successfully navigated America out of a Democratic surplus under Clinton.

When he took office in 2008, Obama inherited the “worst” recession in 75 years and a growing deficit from Bush, but Obama ruined that, too, by seeing $300 billion trimmed off the national debt.

Seriously, there are just so many ways Democrats screwed things up in the last six years that I’m embarrassed to be a member of this party. I’m really hopeful that complete control of Congress can obstruct and mandate us backward, because forward progress has proven to be against the will of the people.

If someone would have asked me whether I could have seen such a massive midterm shift happening in the face of these “so-called” favorable facts of the last six years, I would have said, “When hell freezes over.”

But that, too, is just one more positive outcome of last week’s election: hell freezing is a little bit closer with this new Congress’ rightful disdain over climate change. But I’m no scientist, just a guy looking for good times again.

This column initially appeared in the Imperial Valley Press, Nov. 14, 2014.