Portside

The fact that employers have stopped providing good health insurance or good retirement benefits also has nothing to with technology or globalization or any of the other alibis. In a reasonable society, health insurance and decent retirement would be tax-supported and part of the basic package for everyone. The great hidden injustice in our society is the set of lead weights being placed on the feet of young adults. Your generation should be in the streets.

Obama needs to do something that doesn't come easily to him. He needs to demolish the previous terms of debate, some of them partly of his own making - he needs to disavow earlier mistaken policies that he embraced. Otherwise he will preside over the worst eight-year economic record of any Democratic president, and the steepest rate of decline in social spending. He will leave an economy even more unequal than he inherited. He needs to find the audacity to restore hope