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Why Bob Herbert is the Best Editorialist in the US

From his column today:

With reality now caving in on us — banks and brokerage houses falling like tenpins, a trillion dollars or so in bailout money being added to the nation’s debt burden, families by the hundreds of thousands being driven from their homes by foreclosures — it might make sense to get back to basics. And in the United States, the basic economic component of a sustainable family life is a good job.

What we haven’t paid close enough attention to for many years (a period in which we’ve been oddly obsessed with the financial lives of the rich and famous) is the fact that there haven’t been enough good paying jobs to sustain what most working Americans view as an adequate standard of living. This is a fundamental flaw in the U.S. economic system.

It has been a long time since we had an economic policy that favored the fortunes of working people. Check out Barlett and Steele's book if you want to know more about what that would be like.

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