Alan: It is a measure of America's decline that The Body Politic cannot even posit a new "New Deal."
To identify the single culprit responsible for America's paralyzed politics, it was Ronald Reagan and his destructive insistence that "Government IS The Problem."
Rather, Reagan's political philosophy IS The Problem.
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Why we need a New Deal to tackle long-term unemployment. "Thirty-nine states used $1.3 billion from the fiscal stimulus package passed in 2009 to create more than 260,000 jobs by subsidizing private employers. A subsequent evaluation of the program found that two-thirds of these jobs would not have existed without the subsidy. Many of those jobs went to people who were difficult to employ, including workers who had been jobless for a long time, people on welfare and workers with criminal records. Yet after the program ended in September 2010, 37 percent of the formerly subsidized workers kept their jobs." Eduardo Porter in The New York Times.
