Early Stage Dementia

Is The NYT's health insurance plan so awful that an assisted care facility can't be found for David Brooks? Perhaps the mainstream media can unite to build a facility just for pundits, a lovely, sunny, green place where George F. Will can rant & rave about the dangers of dungarees to the caste system, & Brooks can, as he did yesterday, lament the passing of

The old WASPs [who] were notoriously cheap, sent their children to Spartan boarding schools, and insisted on financial sobriety.

Alas, the Spartan boarding schools of yore! Worse than the Cultural Revolution's reëducation camps, though not quite as severe as Pol Pot's, if memory serves.

But no more, reports a saddened Brooks.

Chain restaurants went into supersize mode, offering gigantic portions that would have been considered socially unacceptable to an earlier generation.

Because going to sleep hungry has always been humanity's secret desire. And he marches on, to a resounding finish.

Over the past few months, those debt levels have begun to come down. But that doesn’t mean we’ve re-established standards of personal restraint. We’ve simply shifted from private debt to public debt. By 2019, federal debt will amount to an amazing 83 percent of G.D.P. (before counting the costs of health reform and everything else). By that year, interest payments alone on the federal debt will cost $803 billion.

These may seem like dry numbers, mostly of concern to budget wonks. But these numbers are the outward sign of a values shift. If there is to be a correction, it will require a moral and cultural movement.

Our current cultural politics are organized by the obsolete culture war, which has put secular liberals on one side and religious conservatives on the other. But the slide in economic morality afflicted Red and Blue America equally.

Brooks & ilk: Never happy unless they can stake out (imaginary) moral high ground.

If there is to be a movement to restore economic values, it will have to cut across the current taxonomies. Its goal will be to make the U.S. again a producer economy, not a consumer economy. It will champion a return to financial self-restraint, large and small.

It will have to take on what you might call the lobbyist ethos — the righteous conviction held by everybody from AARP to the agribusinesses that their groups are entitled to every possible appropriation, regardless of the larger public cost. It will have to take on the self-indulgent popular demand for low taxes and high spending.

A crusade for economic self-restraint would have to rearrange the current alliances and embrace policies like energy taxes and spending cuts that are now deemed politically impossible. But this sort of moral revival is what the country actually needs.

Moral revival. Meaningless boiler plate. Self-restraint. Keep in pants & all that.

Get a job flipping burgers, Brooks, at least then you will be producing something. Can we get David Broder into the pundit home too? He could give Brooksie some really swell bi-partisan ideas.