After seeing yesterday's opinion piece at CNN from David Frum (See this blog post), I wasn't quite as surprised to see another opinion piece today on the lack of jobs. Of course, today's (Tuesday, April 26) from Eugene Robinson at the Washington Post probably won't get much play because Robinson tends to be liberal and we all know liberals aren't considered Very Serious People, so can easily be ignored. Nevertheless, Robinson does have a platform at the Washington Post, so he might get read and even acknowledged as having some right behind his words:
What is it about the word “jobs” that our nation’s leaders fail to understand? How has the most painful economic crisis in decades somehow escaped their notice? Why do they ignore the issues that Americans care most desperately about?Unfortunately, Mr. Robinson will most likely continue to be drowned out by the drumbeat of the deficit hawks. Looking through the various news sites today, I found a couple of articles promoting deficit hawkery though in a rather subtle way. First up is this from USA Today:
Listening to the debate in Washington, you’d think the nation was absorbed by the compelling saga of deficit reduction. You’d get the impression that in households across America, parents put their children to bed and then stay up half the night sifting through piles of think-tank reports on the kitchen table, trying to calculate whether there will be enough in the Social Security trust fund to pay benefits beyond 2037.
And you’d be wrong. Those parents are looking at a pile of bills on the kitchen table, trying to decide which ones have to be paid now and which can slide. The question isn’t how to manage health care or retirement costs two decades from now. It’s how the family can make it to the end of the month.
