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Joel Kotkin thinks our country is in decline and suggests we need to grow our way out of it.
Across broad ideological lines, Americans now foresee a dismal, downwardly mobile future for the country’s middle and working classes. While previous generations generally did far better than their predecessors, those in the current one, outside the very rich, are locked in a struggle to carve out the economic opportunities and access to property that had become accepted norms here over the past century.
This deep-seated social change raises a profound dilemma for business: Either the private sector must find a way to boost economic opportunity, or political pressure seems likely to impose policies that will order redistribution from above. It is doubtful the majority of Americans will continue to support an economic system that seems to benefit only a relative few. Looking at our unequal landscape, one journalist recently asked: “Are the bread riots finally coming?”
By 2020, according to the Economic Policy Institute, almost 30% of American workers are expected to hold low-wage jobs, with earnings that would put them below the poverty line to support a family of four. The combination of high debt and low wages has some projections suggesting millennials may have to work until their early 70s.
But our new pessimism and widening class divide stems not only from the concentration of wealth and power, but from the persistence of weak economic growth. …
More from Michael Goodwin who says the American spirit is breaking.
The official opening of the 9/11 museum brought President Obama to New York and sparked fresh reminders of the horror of that awful day. The president called the site “sacred” and gave a moving speech about the American spirit, saying, “Like the great wall and bedrock that embrace us today, nothing can ever break us.”
It is the right thing to say and the right place to say it. But is it true? Is the American spirit really unbreakable?
I have my doubts.
There are many examples that say our spirit is breaking if not already broken. One involves a Wall Street Journal report that, six years after the housing bubble popped and sank the economy, federal officials want to lower mortgage standards again so more people can buy houses that they can’t afford. Been there, done that would seem to be the logical response, but the idea is gaining momentum because so few people can legitimately qualify for credit that the only way to spur housing growth is to junk the standards.
The same thing is happening in schools. Americans overwhelmingly agree that our educational system, once the envy of the world, is now lagging. …
Ron Christie says the VA scandal is real and the president is hiding from it.
Up to now, President Obama and congressional Democrats had thought “so-called” scandals involving Benghazi, the IRS, and Operation Fast and Furious were largely behind them. Nothing to see, just Republican witch hunts designed to embarrass the president and perhaps land blows against Hillary Clinton. But recent revelations about shoddy care at Veterans Affairs (VA) facilities across the country have brought bipartisan condemnation from Capitol Hill that should worry a commander in chief whose reaction to the brewing tempest has been muted at best.
What is most surprising about the present controversy surrounding the substandard treatment at the VA, in which at least 40 veterans lost their lives while awaiting treatment, is that House Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Jeff Miller (R-FL) had alerted the president to trouble nearly a year ago. In a letter dated May 21, 2013, Miller began:
Dear Mr. President: I am writing to bring to your attention an alarming pattern of serious and significant patient care issues at the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Centers (VAMCs) across the country. Recent events at the Atlanta, Georgia, VAMC provide a perfect illustration of the management failures, deceptions, and lack of accountability permeating VA’s healthcare system…I believe your direct involvement and leadership is required.
A year on from Chairman Miller’s letter, the revelations of substandard care, neglect, and waste seem to have magnified, rather than been reduced. For a president who seems to have endless amounts of time to talk about the miseries of those living on the minimum wage, Obama’s seeming indifference to the severity of the problems faced by our returning veterans seeking care at VA facilities is shocking. …
Ron Fournier wonders how dumb the administration thinks we are.
News quiz: President Obama and his communications team hope that Americans are: 1) Dumb; 2) Distracted; 3) Numb to government inefficiency; 4) All of above.
Answer: 4, all of the above.
That answer along with utter incompetence are the best explanations for why the White House thought it could get away with claiming that the departure of Veterans Affairs official Robert Petzel was a step toward accountability for its scandalous treatment of war veterans.
Fact is, the department announced in 2013 that Dr. Petzel would retire this year.
“Well, Secretary Shinseki accepted Dr. Petzel’s resignation this afternoon. He was due to retire early next month, and obviously there has been a nomination made for his replacement,” White House Chief of Staff Dennis McDonough told CBS’s Major Garrett last week. “I leave to Rick the explanation of his decision, but there is no question that this is a termination of his job there before he was planning to go.”
No. This was neither a termination nor a housecleaning. It was a scapegoating. …
Jim Geraghty says the president is madder than anybody.
The Obama administration is dangerously depleting our nation’s reserves of speechwriting clichés.
For example, when some terrible mess blows up on the president’s watch, what does he say? Come on. You know it.
No one is madder than him.
After White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough assured the public, “nobody is more outraged about this problem right now” than President Obama — an outrage that has yet to be expressed in anything more than pro forma public statements — Reid Epstein decided to look up how often the president assured all of us he was angry — or perhaps more angry than anyone else! — about failures of his administration or other setbacks.
October 2013: “Nobody’s madder than me about the fact that the website isn’t working as well as it should.”
The IRS scandal, May 2013: “Americans are right to be angry about it, and I am angry about it.”
April 2012, the Secret Service prostitution scandal: “If it turns out that some of the allegations that have been made in the press are confirmed, then of course I’ll be angry.” …