David Brooks - there's a reason he's a commentator on NPR every week

[muck_a_luck]

green_grrl pointed me here: "http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/09/opinion/brooks-the-party-of-work.html

David Brooks comments:

Moreover, when they look at the things that undermine the work ethic and threaten their chances to succeed, it’s often not government. It’s a modern economy in which you can work more productively, but your wages still don’t rise. It’s a bloated financial sector that just sent the world into turmoil. It’s a university system that is indispensable but unaffordable. It’s chaotic neighborhoods that can’t be cured by withdrawing government programs.

For these people, the Republican equation is irrelevant. When they hear Romney talk abstractly about Big Government vs. Small Government, they think: He doesn’t get me or people like me.

He ends with a call to actually do some real world research about what actually happens in the lives of American workers and figure out new, cutting edge ways to deal with those problems, whether or not the solution may or may not be more government.

Comments

[green_grrl]

The thing is, I think Brooks is absolutely correct in those two paragraphs, and I think Republicans are never going to reconsider. I wonder how many Rs in New Jersey and New York are going to comfortably slide back into "small government" mentality a few years after the memory of Sandy? Unfortunately, most of them.

[muck_a_luck]

There is a strong tendency to think it's fine when the government give YOU money, but everybody else is a freeloader.

[green_grrl]

A friend of mine had her nephew, originally from Idaho, staying with her. He mostly hung around the house and surfed the Internet, and made no progress on her deadline for him to get a job. Yet he kept spouting all that he'd grown up hearing about freeloaders and responsibility and government handouts and who pays for healthcare. She had to point out to him, "If you got into an accident today, should the hospital turn you away? You have no job, no money ..." Oooooooh ... (p.s. He never did get a job and she packed him off to his parents.)