This week, in the midst of revelations that the NSA has been secretly collecting vast amounts of information on us, and just before yet another middling jobs report was released, President Obama visited North Carolina as part of a "Middle Class Jobs and Opportunities Tour." Though the middle class continues to get pummeled -- with family wealth declining almost 30 percent in the last decade -- the White House brings up the issue only sporadically. It pops up, gets a few lines in a speech, then disappears again. The administration's meandering approach is like when an old person wanders into the kitchen and can't remember why: "Now what did I come in here for? Oh yeah, that's right -- some yogurt... and the middle class!" Maybe the president would be motivated to bring some sustained urgency to this crisis if the conversations the NSA is busy collecting were between America's 22 million unemployed and underemployed.

Of course we can afford the current debt, and we probably could handle another $10 trillion, but who wants to go deeper in debt when we have so much to do to revive the economy and to put people back to work?