Villaraigosa's hand-out mentality

The mayor lays it out perfectly this morning in Washington (he's there for the U.S. Conference of Mayors' meeting). From the LAT:

"Yeah, we've got to cut spending. It's out of control," the mayor told reporters Wednesday at a breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor. "But we've also got to make investments. Nobody stops you on the street and says, 'What are you doing about the deficit and the debt? People ask you, 'How are you going to help me get a job?' "

Help me get a job? The implication is that Washington can somehow create jobs out of whole-cloth, when in fact the best thing Washington can do is create a better economic climate. That means making life a little easier for those out of work (jobless benefits and the like) and, aside from any clear and present emergency (intervention on behalf of the auto industry is a good example), staying away from the economic heavy lifting. But Villaraigosa and folks of similar perspective really believe that the federal government not only has the power but the obligation to butt in, whether it's cranking out make-work programs or offering up a bunch of poorly conceived tax incentives. I don't even think it's an act - they truly believe that this is the way to get it done. Their faulty calculus is almost as distressing as the no-new-tax mantra we hear from the right.