The Hijacked Crisis is another gem from Paul Krugman.

I have picked the following quote because it is a subject I have harped on.

What would a real response to our problems involve? First of all, it would involve more, not less, government spending for the time being — with mass unemployment and incredibly low borrowing costs, we should be rebuilding our schools, our roads, our water systems and more.

In a call to Senator Scott Brown’s office quite a while ago, I made this same point.  I also made this point in a previous blog post in, Mugged by the Moralizers. I’ll quote what I said there.

The American Society of Civil Engineers in its 2009 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure estimates that we need to spend $2.2 trillion dollars over the next 5 years repairing our infrastructure just to prevent it from failing. If we know we need to spend this money at some point in the future, when would be the best time to spend it? I claim that now is the best time.  When private spending is underperforming, there is no better time for public spending. There is little competition for the borrowing capacity.  The infrastructure use is at the lowest ebb that it is going to be (not that it is low, but relatively it is). There is idle labor, equipment, and raw materials, so construction prices are low. There is little risk of inflation because there is so much idle capacity in the system

It is much better to do the work now than wait until the economy booms.  Borrowing will be expensive then as the private sector is competing for loans as they are borrowing to increase capacity.  Workers will be scarce and therefore expensive. Raw materials will be costlier. Adding government spending to private spending at that time will stoke the fires of inflation.

Why would we pass up such a golden opportunity to do work that we know has to get done?

I found the story about Post-Partum Compassion on RawStory. RawStory provided the following transcript:

“This is the problem with entitlements,” he explained. “They are really only entitlements when they are something other people want. When it’s something you want, they are a hallmark of a civilized society, a foundation of a great people. ‘I just had a baby and found out that maternity leave strengthens society, but since I still have a job, unemployment benefits are clearly socialism.’”

“So either Megyn Kelly has inadvertently exposed the hypocrisy at the heart of conservative demonization of unions and the working class or… Oh my God, it’s worse than I thought. Megyn Kelly is suffering from post-partum compassion.”

Here is the video clip.

I found BART cuts cell phone service to stop protest on Rawstory.

Below is the video from CNN that was featured in the story.

The dialog connects this story to British PM Cameron’s threat to close down social media during times of civil unrest and to similar practices in the Middle East that we have decried. I have made these two connections in a previous Facebook conversation. (You have to be a Facebook friend of Laurie Cane to see the Facebook conversation.)