American journalism has generally believed that any important issue can be put into a box called a "story." And each story can be treated as a distinct, self-contained entity that can be understood in relative isolation with little reference to much else. As a result when the media is confronted with a really large issue it does an imitation of the proverbial blind men groping an elephant. Today both our politics and our public policy is confronted with three immense issues: the first involves the debate over the need to deal with unemployment versus reducing the deficit. The second is the massively uneven distribution of wealth and income. The third involves taxes, partly as to how they...
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