Tuesday Morning Reads

Good Morning!

I’m trying to get back into the idea of “time” right now.  I still feel jet-lagged and I keep having to remind myself what day, month and hour it is.  It’s a really strange feeling to be so displaced in time. It reminds me of when I was deep in the fight against cancer and having chemo.  Everything is here and now.

The President made a stop to see the flooding in St. John’s Parish yesterday.  This is one of the more rural parishes in Southern Louisiana.  It really got drenched.  LaPlace is a bedroom community that frequently attracts families where one person works in Baton Rouge and the other in New Orleans.  It sits adjacent to all kinds of interstate action so its easy to move around SE Louisiana from the small town. The rest of the parish is very rural and quite Cajun.

“What I’ve pledged to these folks is we’re going to make sure at the federal level we are getting on the case very quickly about figuring out what exactly happened here and what can do to make sure it doesn’t happen again and expedite some of the decisions that may need to be made,” Obama told reporters after touring hard-hit St. John the Baptist Parish, 30 miles outside of New Orleans.

Joined by Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal and members of Louisiana’s congressional delegation, Obama walked through a neighborhood of brick homes and front yards that were a painful reminder of last week’s hurricane. Orderly piles of water-logged debris — bedding, insulation, furniture and toys — filled the yards.

The president shook hands with residents in La Place, where several neighborhoods were inundated by water and some residents were rescued from rooftops by boats.

“How y’all doing?” he asked.

“Better now,” one man shouted back.

In the sticky heat, the president walked from house to house, asking residents about what happened and posing for photos. There was debris but no signs of lingering water.

“We’re here to help,” the president said at another home.

Obama praised the coordination of federal, state and local officials and pointed out that his administration issued disaster declarations well in advance to ensure officials “weren’t behind the eight ball.” In highlighting the work, Obama was drawing a contrast with President George W. Bush’s widely criticized response to Hurricane Katrina seven years ago.

The President also celebrated labor day with Auto and Steel Workers in the swing state of Ohio.  Unlike Eric Cantor who insisted that Labor day was a day to salute “risk takers”, the President recognized the importance of the labor movement in the United States and was welcomed for his role in saving the US Auto Industry. Did I mention that I bought Ford for about $1.67 a share a few months after Obama took office?   It’s over $9 now.  Too bad I couldn’t have sunk a lot more money into it!

Hours earlier in Ohio, Obama spoke to members of the United Auto Workers and United Steelworkers, and noted his decision to rescue automakers General Motors and Chrysler in 2009, a move that Romney opposed.

“If America had thrown in the towel like that, GM and Chrysler wouldn’t exist today,” Obama said. “The suppliers and the distributors that get their business from these companies would have died off, too. Then even Ford could have gone down as well.”

There’s an awful essay out by  Nicholas Eberstadt that suggests that we’ve become a nation of “takers”.   He works for the AEI so it’s not unusual that ideology takes a front seat to evidence.  He does notice that “entitlement” spending has grown more rapidly under Republicans than Democrats, but seems to overlook the idea that we all work and pay for the majority of our social insurance programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Worker’s Comp.  How can we take what we have paid premiums to receive?  Here’s a sample of things that I found highly offensive in his writings.

How has America’s great postwar male flight from work been possible? To ask the question is to answer it: This is a creature of our entitlement society and could not have been possible without it. Transfers for retirement, income maintenance, unemployment insurance, and all the rest have made it possible for a lower fraction of adult men to be engaged in work today than at any time since the Great Depression—and, quite possibly, at any previous point in our national history. For American men, work is no longer a duty or a necessity: rather, it is an option. In making work merely optional for America’s men, the US entitlement state has undermined the foundations of what earlier generations termed “the manly virtues”—unapologetically, and without irony. Whatever else may be said about our country’s earlier gender roles and stereotypes, it was the case the manly virtues cast able-bodied men as protectors of society, not predators living off of it. That much can no longer be said.

From a Nation of Takers to a Nation of Gamers to a Nation of Chiselers

With the disappearance of the historical stigma against dependence on government largesse, and the normalization of lifestyles relying upon official resource transfers, it is not surprising that ordinary Americans should have turned their noted entrepreneurial spirit, not simply to maximizing their take from the existing entitlement system, but to extracting payouts from the transfer state that were never intended under its programs. In this environment, gaming and defrauding the entitlement system have emerged as a mass phenomenon in modern America, a way of life for millions of men and women who would no doubt unhesitatingly describe themselves as law-abiding and patriotic citizens of the United States.

Abuse of the generosity of our welfare state has, to be sure, aroused the ire of the American public in the past, and continues to arouse it from time to time today. For decades, a special spot in the rhetorical public square has been reserved for pillorying unemployed “underclass” gamers who cadge undeserved social benefits. (This is the “welfare Cadillac” trope, and its many coded alternatives.) Public disapproval of this particular variant of entitlement misuse was sufficiently strong that Congress managed to overhaul the notorious AFDC program in a reform of welfare that replaced the old structure with TANF. But entitlement fiddling in modern America is by no means the exclusive preserve of a troubled underclass. Quite the contrary: it is today characteristic of working America, and even those who would identify themselves as middle class.

Here is a response to the essay written by Lane Kenworthy that I found highly interesting.

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