Op-Ed: America’s pandemic welfare shuts down on Thursday — Going backward, dumbly
America is off track. Immigration and homelessness crisis in large metropolises like Los Angeles is the best example. — Image: © AFP
The New York Times has an article about the dismantling of a “European-style welfare state” created by the pandemic. It’s an interesting article, but there are a lot of much deeper issues in this quite unnecessary return to prehistory that deserve a look.
One of those issues is America’s obsessive fluency in getting social welfare management so very wrong, all the time. Nobody needs housing, education, decent quality of life, health, or anything else, presumably. The country has been in denial since at least Nixon on all these subjects, and there’s some rather drab psychology to go with this all-pervasive denialism.
America tends to mistake itself for its own media image. That’s turned out to be effectively fatal for social basics.
According to this self-image:
- Everyone has a job, owns a house, and lives in a sitcom. In practice, the entire country is
