This is a sea change in American elite politics:
[O]ne of the things that we all agree to is that the touchstone for economic policy is, does it allow the average American to find good employment and see their incomes rise; that we can’t just look at things in the aggregate, we do want to grow the pie, but we want to make sure that prosperity is spread across the spectrum of regions and occupations and genders and races; and that economic policy should focus on growing the pie, but it also has to make sure that everybody has got opportunity in that system.Success within reach of everyone!? Every Republican knows that the important numbers are the stock market indexes. Those are the numbers that reflect the proper ideological, perfervid faith that "the rich will make wise, proper investments that will grow the economy," as one particularly indiscreet conservative commenter put it.
(Note to talk radio meme-mongerers: Obama did this entire interview without a teleprompter and without aides. It's remarkably devoid of the empty and disconnected sloganeering that Duhbya used to repeat until his interviewer gave up.)
(h/t Mom for pointing the interview out to me)
2 comments:
Obama may need to phone back the NYT yet again to insist he is not a socialist. The stock market remains 6000 points down - which affects the retirement plans of everyone, including all those TIAA-CREEFers who voted for him - because investors can not trust his policies. The Shenannigans with Chrysler bailout is a primo example.
A real liberal is an economic liberal as well who cherishes the power of an economy to sustain individual freedoms. 'Aggregating' and 'spreading' via policy robs people of their freedom, their lives. Rather than a 'common pie,' we all have our own pies, and viewed that way the economy is not a zero sum game. Illegal immigrants steal jobs if we share a pie; if we each bake our own, we have the dignity to enjoy it and share it with true generosity of the heart. Indiscreet? never! Conservative? actually capital L Liberal.
And tip my hat to Mom, too.
Guess you didn't hear the sarcasm - or maybe you just ignored it to make your tired and discredited points.
For you, a "real" liberal is an economic libertarian. Uh, keep living in the distant past, when depressions came around every decade or so to see to everyone's creative destruction.
What you fail to see is how well your rhetoric selects feudalism as the best economic system. No thanks.
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