Why Are We Still Waiting On A Jobs Plan?

washingtonpost.com — We are witnessing what social critic Naomi Klein has called “the shock doctrine” — politicians using a crisis to force through ruinous policies that the public would otherwise never accept. The trillion-dollar annual deficits coming out of the Great Recession are used to justify an assault on core building blocks of economic security. The debt-ceiling debacle bequeathed the misbegotten “fiscal cliff” — mandated spending cuts and expiring tax provisions at the end of the year. To avoid that, legislators are meeting in backrooms about a “grand bargain” to reduce deficits by trading cuts in Medicare and Social Security for some greater tax revenue. Neither presidential candidate is prepared to embrace this folly publicly or break with it in private.

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