I suppose some of us may be on the wrong side of this or perhaps weird…or maybe un-American…because we think that, hey, it isn’t a bad thing to spend taxpayer money on saving jobs and communities. If you gave me the choice, I’d be pretty damn proud to know that my money is going to keep tens of thousands of people working–as opposed, say, to dropping more bombs on people in Afghanistan.

   But, even "liberals" like Robert Reich are up in arms about trying to save General Motors. If you can bear it, you can watch this debate from last night where I had to not only grapple with Larry Kudlow and James Glassman–the conservative, pro-business types–but also Reich. I was prepared for the Kudlow rants about the union (though I have to say he was relatively mild) but what really set me off is listening to Reich bemoan spending money on working people–and saying so from his nice, secure perch at UC Berkeley:

    Painful.

   At the same time, my goal in spending time wrestling with these folks is to at least point out some new frames. And, in this case, I repeated the point that, if we are to learn one thing from the GM debacle, it is that our crazy health care system is at fault–if we had had a single payer system in this country, the auto companies–not to mention the rest of industry–would not have had to bear the billions of dollars of health care costs that crippled their bottom lines. And, to my surprise, Kudlow, when this comes up at the end, actually took it somewhat seriously.