Ej Wants A New New Deal - Road to the Middle Class

YOU CAN RELY on columnist E.J. Dionne for the straight up-and-down liberal view of things. And we mean that in the best way, that he is an honest liberal who just wants government to solve everything. Like jobs.

Things aren’t going too well on the jobs front, he worries, for the job creation since the last recession is “the slowest in any recovery since the Kennedy administration.” And, of course, they aren’t the “good” jobs of the golden years, “secure, well-compensated jobs” like the ones they used to have at the auto companies.

What's needed, [progressive politicians have] said, is heavy investment in education and job training to allow people to make the transition from the "old" economy -- those auto jobs -- to the new. "What you earn depends upon what you can learn," President Bill Clinton said over and over.

We need a new New Deal. Otherwise it will mean uncontrolled offshoring of jobs. Dionne then gets in his “narrative,” as the postmodernists would say:

Historically, voters turn away from conservative free-market politicians after they conclude that capitalism needs help in living up to its commitment to create widely shared abundance. After World War II, voters in rich countries entered a social democratic bargain in which capitalism became the bedrock of the economy but was tempered by a large public sector and a unionized industrial sector that provided social insurance, education, pensions and health care.

Actually, voters turned away from the free market in 1933 when the Progressive suits totally screwed up the economy. And then over the next two generations New Dealers totally screwed up social insurance, education, pensions, and health care. They screwed it up by running it all through the government so that social needs were driven by the need of politicians for votes. Let’s take them in turn:

Social insurance like Social Security and Medicare? Heading for a brick wall.
Education? A wasteland utterly abandoned to the special interests.
Pensions? The good old defined-benefit pension utterly ruined by greedy unions and greedy corporations.
Health care? An expensive mess because people pay for health care with other peoples” money.

Here’s the problem, E.J. We can’t have a new deal, or even a New Deal. Because we are already spending something north of 15 percent of GDP on the last New Deal.

If we really want a new deal of the cards we would have to put all that stuff on the table: all the programs, the subsidies, the handouts, the waste of the past seventy years.

And that is something that progressives like you, E.J., absolutely refuse to discuss. You won’t reform Social Security, won’t reform education. And you say nothing while disability rolls double every ten years.

If we want good jobs at good wages we are going to have to get the progressives out of the way. That is something that the voters may be getting wise to.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.