David Brooks Says Unemployed Care More About Values Than Jobs

(Oct. 29) -- The latest economic growth numbers aren't good: The economy grew just 2 percent in the third quarter, the Commerce Department reported today.

It's a "slight uptick" from the previous quarter, reports The New York Times, but not enough to put a dent in the country's 9.6 percent unemployment rate. "The economy needs to produce 130,000 to 150,000 jobs a month just to keep pace with population growth, a number it has not hit in many months," the Times continues.

You would think jobs would be the primary concern of the large number of unemployed, but not so, says The New York Times' conservative columnist David Brooks. In his Thursday column, Brooks writes, "The public's real anxiety is about values, not economics: the gnawing sense that Americans have become debt-addicted and self-indulgent."

Dean Baker, one of the few economists to warn about the housing bubble, pounces. "This is really priceless. There are more than 25 million people unemployed, underemployed or who have given up looking for work altogether, but they are not concerned about economics. They are worried about values," writes Baker, the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

In the same column, Brooks also writes, "Obama came to be defined by his emergency responses to the fiscal crisis."

Another doozy, according to Baker:

Yes, the column says "fiscal." Is this the mother of all Freudian slips or what? Brooks somehow wrote "fiscal," when he obviously meant "financial." Neither he nor his editor caught it on a second reading. You couldn't ask for a better example of the elite's fixation with making this into a fiscal crisis. The Wall Street boys wrecked the economy with their greed and ineptitude and now they intend to make ordinary workers pay for it with cuts to Social Security and Medicare. Talk about a crisis of values.

Read more at The New York Times and Baker's blog, Beat the Press.

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