No one comes into this world with a money-back guarantee on the back of his birth certificate, nor even a limited warranty. The only way we can insulate anyone from the brutal realities facing the whole society is to put his burden onto someone else. This neat dichotomy did an end-run around the plain reality that 99 percent of the things we need in this life are neither rights nor privileges, but things that we work for. That includes the respect of other people. The administration's desperate efforts to rescue the economy before it rescues itself reflects an urgent need to make use of a sense of panic that cannot last after the current upturn reaches the point of creating millions of jobs before politicians can claim credit for it.
Debt has no meaning by itself, but only in relation to income and resources.
Historians of the future will be baffled by how we allowed a routine recession to be hyped by politicians and the media into some monstrosity that should cause us to repudiate the kind of economy which has produced two centuries of prosperity, the highest standard of living in the world, and a current growth rate above our own historical average. This is not an administration with a muddled sense of how to help the economy, but an administration with a very clear sense of how to gain more power over the economy and over the lives of ordinary people. Years before the recent recession began, people like Robert Reich and Laura Tyson were singing the praises of government intervention, in good times and in bad, whether the economy was going up, down, or sideways. These are the anointed, who think that they should be telling businessmen how to run their businesses, generals how to run the military, and parents how to raise their children. Many of us want to see the economy booming on its own, but to the people around the new President, that would be a cruel disappointment to all their plans to take over more of our lives.