E.J. Dionne’s Answer to Everything: More Government

E.J Dionne is, among other things, a columnist over at the Washington Post. The other day he sent a column to print that probably wasn’t meant to be seen outside the halls of the Democratic Socialist Party. Let’s have a look at an excerpt from his piece:

Yet the drumbeat of propaganda against government has made it impossible for the plain truth about the stimulus to break through. […] The stimulus, CBO concluded, added as many as 3.3 million jobs during the second quarter of 2010, and it may have kept us from lapsing back into recession.

Okay, slow down boy. I think you lost me somewhere along the way. Obama’s administration took an unprecedented step when it decided to shower the economy with money, pretty much everything borrowed, in order to get the country out of the recession, toward great economic growth, and to prevent unemployment from rising above 8%. Not only was the stimulus a failure, it heaped debt upon this and future generations. What’s that? How it will be paid off? We’re not concerned with such petty questions.

Here’s another gem from the same piece:

Indeed, our unemployment rate is higher today than it should be because conservatives blocked additional federal spending to prevent layoffs by state and local governments — and because progressives, including Obama, took too long to propose more federal help.

It’s all so clear! More government spending, more government jobs, more government everything. Dionne sounds like a broken gramophone record just repeating the same slogan over and over. If government truly was the solution to all our problems, why do we then even bother with the private sector at all?

E.J Dionne’s piece might not be the brightest column to appear in print, but it sure gives a handy look at how liberals and progressives view government. And you know what? It sounds an awful lot like a certain other ideology that starts with an S.