This is the legacy of the Reagan era: keep hacking away at vital parts of the safety net so politicians can proclaim they didn't raise taxes. It makes as much sense as selling your car's spare tire and jack.

Republicans used tax cuts as a way to bludgeon Democratic opponents, and instead of making voters understand how vital these government services are, Democrats far too often agreed with the Republicans and raced to cut everything they could. And now, when we need it most, the unemployment system is literally falling apart.

Who could have predicted that if you keep slicing vital services, you wouldn't have them when you need them?

WASHINGTON — Years of state and federal neglect have hobbled the nation’s unemployment system just as a brutal recession has doubled the number of jobless Americans seeking aid.

In a program that values timeliness above all else, decisions involving more than a million applicants have been slowed, and hundreds of thousands of needy people have waited months for checks.

And with benefit funds at dangerous lows even before the recession began, states are taking on billions in debt, increasing the pressure to raise taxes or cut aid, just as either would inflict maximum pain.

Sixteen states, with exhausted funds, are now paying benefits with borrowed cash, and their number could double by the year’s end.

Call centers and Web sites have been overwhelmed, leaving frustrated workers sometimes fighting for days to file an application.

While the strained program still makes more than 80 percent of initial payments within three weeks — slightly below the standard set under federal law — cases that require individual review are especially prone to delay. Thirty-eight states are failing to make those decisions within the federal deadline.

For workers who survive a paycheck at a time, even a week’s delay can mean a missed rent payment or foregone meals.

This is the part of the article that sets my blood boiling:

“Lower tax rates make it easier to attract business,” said Doug Holmes, president of UWC, a group that advocates on behalf of employers. “We don’t want to spend a whole lot of time beating ourselves up because we didn’t raise taxes enough. Nobody anticipated a recession this size.”

Yeah, nobody except a couple of Nobel Prize-winning economists and a bunch of dirty hippies with computers.

The Roosevelt Institution:

One year ago, representatives of progressive college students across America came together at the Roosevelt Policy Expo in DC and at the FDR Home in Hyde Park, NY, to discuss the most pressing issues facing our generation.After setting ourselves three challenges, we returned back to our college and university campuses and performed a year's worth of public policy research. We held conferences, conducted public fora, got small groups together for public policy brainstorming sessions, wrote papers and theses, and met with extracurricular groups. As the year came to a close, we selected the best 25 ideas that we wanted to bring to the public policy discussion.

I spent a couple of hours this afternoon reading through TRI's ideas, and I was very impressed. Given that my Reagan era generation focused on making as much personal money and not a lot on how we could make things better for all of us, it's refreshing to see politically engaged and committed young people thinking bigger picture.

What do you think of their ideas?

MSNBC:

Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, an unabashed apostle of Reagan era conservatism and the first woman U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, has died.

The death of the 80-year-old Kirkpatrick, who began her public life as a Hubert Humphrey Democrat, was announced Friday at the senior staff meeting of the U.S. mission to the United Nations and on the Web site of the American Enterprise Institute, where she had been a senior fellow.

In all honesty, my best memory of Jeane Kirkpatrick has nothing to do with her but with an imagined exchange between her and her "lover", Al Franken, in the introduction of Franken's book Rush Limbaugh is a Big, Fat Idiot (scroll about 2/3 down the page to read the exchange).