scrooge's nightmare

... during the other 364 days of the year, as told by dougj @ balloon juice:

american politics is haunted by the specter of undeserving poor and working class americans living beyond their means on someone else's dime. it's not just strapping young bucks buying t-bone steaks with food stamps, it's strapping young bucks buying flat-screen tvs with credit cards they can't pay off, strapping young bucks gorging themselves at the applebee's salad bar with their inflated union wages, strapping young bucks buying houses with CRA-mandated subprime loans, strapping young bucks suing doctors with lawyers on retainer, strapping young bucks getting elective surgery with their taxpayer-subsidized health care. it's an all-purpose paradigm — it explains why welfare and single-payer health care are bad, why we need "tort reform" rather than health care reform, why the bankruptcy bill was good, and why we had a recession even with galtian geniuses like greenspan and rubin in charge of everything.

now you'll have to excuse me ... here comes that shiftless bob cratchit and his useless whelp tiny tim. whatever could they want now?