It’s the Jobs, Stupid.
You can’t swing your arms on the internet these days without hearing talk about jobs, and with good reason. We’ve got fewer job openings* and high unemployment, particularly high long term unemployment. It’s all about the jobs, and in many ways its about the fact that despite the law, people much over 40 are having a hard time getting them. And if you’re a new grad? You’ll be taking less pay* than you would have in recent years (and be delighted to have anything, alas). Meanwhile, the income gap is growing and our credit scores are getting worse — a polite way of saying we’re collectively having trouble paying our bills.
However, instead of talking about works programs that would put people to work now and create infrastructure that would create more jobs later, we have Hundreds of Hoovers looking to slash spending anywhere they can — but Heaven Forbid they should slash the Wars Without End, or turn thousands of criminal jobs into decent jobs, or slash actual waste, or make the people (and corporations!) who can most afford to pay taxes pay just a little more! Oh no, we can’t have any of those things.
Nope. They’re saying that tax cuts don’t result in the government getting less money, everything is Obama’s fault, that somehow cutting taxes creates jobs (I suspect the underpants gnomes are integral to that working), and — get this! — we little people are just going to have to get used to the idea that Social Security is going to be gutted.
We may also have to get used to the coming food riots.
I can’t think of the last time I linked Atrios, but he’s right. They don’t care about cutting the deficit, they care about making things better for the people at top and worse for the people at bottom.
Somewhere, Baby Boomers got the idea that there was never gonna be any Social Security money for them, so they set about destroying the system, insuring that prediction came to pass. Now those selfish young adults are getting on towards retirement age, and some of them have been forcibly retired. Talk about raising the retirement age to 70? Fine, but when was the last time you saw a 70 year old bricklayer, truck driver, computer programmer, barrista, or waitress?
So in the end, this is what we’ve got:
In Closing: nuclear explosions (a worthwhile way to spend 14 minutes); malaria; useless fliers; alert the media, the FDIC wants to do it’s job; factory farming means our produce isn’t as healthy as it was 30 years ago; why Johnnie doesn’t know his colors; super-extra polite phrases in Japanese.
*Somewhere along the line, USA Today turned into a proper news source! Kudos to them.