David Brooks Tells Us the Unemployed Are Really Concerned About Value

This from CEPR - Center for Economic and Policy Research - please follow link to original

Any faith I had left in The New York Times is fast eroding. Its main saving grace is that The Washington Post is FAR worse.

What has happened to my country?


David Brooks Tells Us the Unemployed Are Really Concerned About Values
Print
Friday, 29 October 2010 03:03


Hell no, I'm not kidding. Here it is:

"the public's real anxiety is about values, not economics: the gnawing sense that Americans have become debt-addicted and self-indulgent."

This is really priceless. There are more than 25 million people unemployed, underemployed or who have given up looking for work altogether, but they are not concerned about economics. They are worried about values.

Okay, I will stop with the ridiculing of David Brooks, I know it's cheap fun. But, I do have to point out one other real winner in this column:

" Obama came to be defined by his emergency responses to the fiscal crisis."

Yes, the column says "fiscal." Is this the mother of all Freudian slips or what? Brooks somehow wrote "fiscal," when he obviously meant "financial." Neither he nor his editor caught it on a second reading. You couldn't ask for a better example of the elite's fixation with making this into a fiscal crisis. The Wall Street boys wrecked the economy with their greed and ineptitude and now they intend to make ordinary workers pay for it with cuts to Social Security and Medicare. Talk about a crisis of values.