The economy is no longer providing "good jobs to ordinary workers". Jeb Bush thinks that means
workers are lazy:
The Laziness Dogma, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: Americans work longer hours
than their counterparts in just about every other wealthy country... Not surprisingly,
work-life balance is a big problem for many people.
But Jeb Bush — who is still attempting to justify his ludicrous claim that he can double
our rate of economic growth — says that Americans “need to work
longer hours and through their productivity gain more income for their families.”
Mr. Bush’s aides have tried to spin away his remark... It’s obvious from the context,
however, that ... he was talking about ... the “nation of takers” dogma... — the insistence
that a large number of Americans, white as well as black, are choosing not to work, because
they can live lives of leisure thanks to government programs. ...
Where does Jeb Bush fit into this story? Well before his “longer hours” gaffe, he had
professed himself a great admirer of the work of
Charles Murray, a conservative social analyst most famous for his 1994 book “The Bell
Curve,” which claimed that blacks are genetically inferior to whites. What Mr. Bush seems
to admire most, however, is a more recent book, “Coming Apart,” which notes that over the
past few decades working-class white families have been changing in much the same way that
African-American families changed in the 1950s and 1960s, with declining rates of marriage
and labor force participation.
Some of us look at these changes and see them as consequences of an economy that no longer
offers good jobs to ordinary workers. This happened to African-Americans first, as
blue-collar jobs disappeared from inner cities, but has now become a much wider phenomenon
thanks to soaring income inequality. Mr. Murray, however, sees the changes as the
consequence of a mysterious decline in traditional values, enabled by government programs
which mean that men no longer “need to
work to
survive.” And Mr. Bush presumably shares that view. ...
There’s now an effective consensus among Democrats ... that workers need more help...
Republicans, however, believe that American workers just aren’t trying hard enough..., and
that the way to change that is to strip away the safety net while cutting taxes on wealthy
“job creators.”
And while Jeb Bush may sometimes sound like a moderate, he’s very much in line with the
party consensus. If he makes it to the White House, the laziness dogma will rule public
policy.