The Redistribution Of Dreams

A friend is celebrating the season by visiting her children in the States. Like many millennials, her 20-something son is working brutal hours for minimum wage at an unfulfilling job. After visiting with him and his girlfriend, my friend emailed, "These kids are SO stuck in not being able to even pay their rent that they have no energy left to dream anything." 

A similar story is playing out in family after family across America. Twenty-somethings are holding down two minimum wage jobs because no one wants to hire full-time people for whom they might have to provide health insurance. In a stagnant economy, their unemployment tops the chart. Meanwhile, they are saddled with debt and taxes for entitlements they will probably never receive, like social security. 

As I moved through the day, my friend's words haunted me. They perched at the back of my mind as I read a New York Times article that was an odd combination of proclaiming the obvious and writhing to avoid it. One quote captures the dance: "These days the word ["redistribution"] is particularly toxic at the White House, where it has been hidden away to make the Affordable Care Act more palatable to the public and less a target for Republicans.... But the redistribution of wealth has always been a central feature of the law and lies at the heart of the insurance market disruptions driving political attacks this fall." The obvious: The core goal of Obamacare is the redistribution of wealth. The writhing: Obama lied, only he had to lie because of those wretched Republicans.

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