The Working Poor

Nobody who is employed should ever have to raise a family in poverty.
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We can’t ask senior citizens and working families to shoulder the entire burden of deficit reduction while asking nothing more from the wealthiest and the most powerful.

Most Americans — Democrats, Republicans and independents — understand that we can’t just cut our way to prosperity. They know that broad-based economic growth requires a balanced approach to deficit reduction, with spending cuts and revenue, and with everybody doing their fair share.

The president has had failures and missteps, to be sure. Every administration has some. None are perfect. But the idea of grinding government to a halt in opposition to one leader — as Republicans have done — has been an extraordinary and infuriating thing to behold.

And it has been sad to watch a president full of hope and promise be stymied at nearly every turn and have to reframe his objectives.

And I think America was very lucky that Abraham Lincoln was President when he was President. If he hadn’t been, the course of history would be very different. But I also think that, despite being the greatest President, in my mind, in our history, it took another hundred and fifty years before African-Americans had anything approaching formal equality, much less real equality. I think that doesn’t diminish Lincoln’s achievements, but it acknowledges that at the end of the day we’re part of a long-running story. We just try to get our paragraph right.

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