Slouching Towards Oblivion

Saturday, October 15, 2011

Yay David Frum - Kinda

From truthout:
This is not a moment for government to be cutting back. … Right now we’re watching state governments try to balance all of their budgets at the same time in the middle of this crisis. We’ve seen half a million public sector jobs disappear. Now, if these were good times, I would applaud that. We need to see a thinner public sector — especially at the state and local level. But we’re seeing what happens when you do that as an anti-recession measure and you make the recession worse. And even though we’re in a technical recovery, incomes and employment — all of that remains lagging for people — I think that we’ve rediscovered in this crisis something that I think we all knew. Which is, there’s a reason why the people of the 1930s built some kind of minimum guarantee — unemployment insurance, health care coverage and things like that. And it’s not because they wanted to be nice. It’s because in a crisis when people lose their jobs, if there is no social safety net they loose 100 percent of their purchasing power.
Even tho' I agree with him on the basics of keeping Government under control, I've not been much of a fan of Lil Davey Frum because there was always something in the way he spoke that sounded hollow.  The piece from truthout goes a good way to explaining it.  Maybe it's just that it's always good to find out there are others who think like me. Dunno, but Frum has a decent-sized audience, and while he won't be delivering them to the Dems, leading them away from the Extreme Right should be a good thing.

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