Reagan Got It Wrong

First, read this article by E.J. Dionne, Jr. from which comes this excerpt:

Yet the drumbeat of propaganda against government has made it impossible for the plain truth about the stimulus to break through. It was thus salutary that Douglas Elmendorf, the widely respected director of the Congressional Budget Office, told a congressional hearing last week that 80 percent of economic experts surveyed by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business agreed that the stimulus got the unemployment rate lower at the end of 2010 than it would have been otherwise. Only 4 percent disagreed. The stimulus, CBO concluded, added as many as 3.3 million jobs during the second quarter of 2010, and it may have kept us from lapsing back into recession.

So when conservatives say, as they regularly do, that “government doesn’t create jobs,” the riposte should be quick and emphatic: “Yes it has, and yes, it does!”

Indeed, our unemployment rate is higher today than it should be because conservatives blocked additional federal spending to prevent layoffs by state and local governments — and because progressives, including Obama, took too long to propose more federal help. Obama’s jobs program would be a step in the right direction, and he’s right to tout it now. But he should have pushed for a bigger stimulus from the beginning. The anti-government disposition has so much power that Democrats and moderate Republicans allowed themselves to be intimidated into keeping it too small.

Let’s turn Ronald Reagan’s declaration on its head: Opposition to government isn’t the solution. Opposition to government was and remains the problem. It is past time that we affirm government’s ability to heal the economy, and its responsibility for doing so.

As I've tried to catch up on all the news and the general feel of the state, I see a lot of people expressing concern and disatisfaction with the messaging from Tom Barrett and the Democrats, especially in the recall election.

I can't say I disagree. I even said as much when I pointed out that I think one of the mistakes made in the recall was the Barrett/Democratic abandonment of Labor and collective bargaining.

Until the Dems start getting back to the things that work, like standing up with the people instead of the corporations and the plutocrats, they will continue to keep coming up short. They can't do greed as well as the GOP who has had years to hone that game.