Here is an example of what I'm talking about, an excerpt from today's Washington Post editorial by David Broder. He is talking about what Rep. Barney Frank has been saying in speeches lately:

While most of those in office or seeking office suggest that tweaking the economy with modest measures such as more job training or new tax incentives will revive the great job-growing engines of the 1990s, Frank offers a more sweeping and disturbing hypothesis.

A fundamental shift has occurred, he says. "The ability of the private sector in this country to create wealth is now outstripping its ability to create jobs. The normal rule of thumb by which a certain increase in the gross domestic product would produce a concomitant increase in jobs does not appear to apply."

That is the basic reason, he suggests, for this jobless recovery -- why month after month the economic growth figures spell boom, and month after month unemployment remains stubbornly high and more thousands become so discouraged they give up the search for work.

Frank buttresses his argument by pointing out that the boom in corporate profits and the rise in the stock market have been accompanied not just by joblessness but by a decline in real wages, a falloff in private health insurance and a rise in income inequality.

All this suggests something more is at work than just bad luck or bad timing -- a shift requiring a fundamental re-examination of the available options.

Why is this boom leaving so many worse off? Frank's catalogue of causes is a familiar one: globalization and its handmaiden, the outsourcing of jobs to low-wage countries; the weakening of unions; the tilt of the tax system in favor of the wealthy investor. And Frank endorses the regular catalogue of remedies urged by Kerry and other mainstream Democrats. They include tougher trade rules, restoration of union organizing and bargaining rights and steps to make the tax system more progressive. Like everyone else, including Bush, he says education, innovation and skills training are the keys to a healthy long-term economic future.

But unlike others, Frank does not stop at that point. Just as he is bold in diagnosing the cause of the problem -- a private economy geared to producing wealth, not jobs -- he is equally daring in his remedies.

Toward the end of his speech, Frank uttered a sentence one can hardly imagine coming from the mouth of a 21st-century American politician. "Our problem today," he said, "is too little government."

When I asked him in an interview Thursday if he was sending a message to Kerry, Frank said, "It's a message for all Democrats. What I'm saying is we're in a situation now where we need the government, and where is it? We've cut taxes, we've criticized bureaucracy, we've almost condemned the public sector. I'm saying it's time to talk positively about government and use it to do what the private economy is no longer doing."

Complete artice here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56650-2004Mar13.html