A Thousand Reasons
by digby
Brad DeLong:
U.S. first-time jobless claims unexpectedly rise, up 12,000 to 472,000 in latest week
I tell you. Writing the history of this episode is going to be next to impossible. "But why didn't they see?!?" is what the students are all going to ask. And I have no answer...
It is going to be impossible. But I have a feeling it will not be because there is no answer. It will be because there are too many.
I have written before that I'm coming to believe that this must be a function of the time in which we live and a serious systemic dysfunction, rather than any particular issue. The bizarre resemblance to the Iraq war debate in which varying parties in the decision making process offered a variety of unconvincing reasons, some aghast close observers shouted shrilly into the void and the majority of the people got confused and ended up throwing in their lot with whatever group with which they instinctively identified is just too much to chalk up to coincidence. Nobody ever knew the "real" motivations ---it all just seemed to happen because certain Very Important and certain Very Serious people decided for varying reasons that it should.
I think the War on the Unemployed (aka the War on the Deficit) is very much like the invasion of Iraq --- a senseless, self-destructive, incomprehensible trainwreck that nobody truly understands, but which seems to have a life of its own. It's tempting to find conspiracies to explain it or seek out some secret motivation behind it all. But I suspect it's more like a virus that just mutates as necessary as it goes about attacking its host.
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