Share The Sacrifice
Digby writes a great op-ed in The Hill which shines a light on the obsession our media elites have with the federal deficit and believe that working class Americans aren’t pulling their weight when it comes to sharing the sacrifice. ” Share the Sacrifice .” In a piece in last week’s edition of The Nation titled “Why Washington doesn’t care about jobs,” Christopher Hayes points out that D.C. is doing much better than the rest of the country economically, which is a significant contributor to what he terms “social distance” from the Americans the government purports to serve. That distance is disorienting and bizarre to those of us outside the Beltway, and is hugely fueled by the annoying conceit of many in the political media that they personally embody the concerns of average Americans. This misguided assumption would be merely amusing if not for the fact that almost the entire political conversation in the U.S. takes place among this small group of people — and that these alleged champions of the middle class inevitably convey the impression that Americans across the land are obsessed with deficit reduction and low taxes, which require deep cuts to “entitlements.” Yet out here in the real world, poll after poll shows that, in fact, Americans are far more concerned with unemployment and favor surtaxes on the wealthy to close the deficit. And so, from time to time, these gilded Regular Joes are forced to regretfully admit that sometimes the people are like dotty old relatives who “just don’t get it” or that they just want a “free lunch” — after which they promptly forget those findings and go back to pretending that the American people see things exactly the way they do…. read on Please read the whole piece because the Villagers are filtering the very complex polices that make up a big chunk of the American budget into their own cynical belief system on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid which is damaging not to the very rich, but the average Joes and Janes.
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on March 14, 2011. Filed under