Who dares write stuff like this?

The situation in which [former New Orleans] residents find themselves is an extreme example of a trend underway for a quarter-century, a shift of economic risk from business and government to working families, and an increasing reliance on free markets to manage society's problems.

Safety nets such as unemployment compensation, employer-provided healthcare insurance and pensions, and, recently, effective disaster relief have been reeled in or removed. Increasingly, families from the working poor to the affluent are left largely to buy and sell their own way to safety even when their individual efforts seem utterly outgunned…

Some leftist rag? No.

The author is LA Times reporter Peter G. Gosselin who writes regularly on economics as lived by ordinary people. Such reporting is pretty darn rare in mainstream media. In the fall of 2004 he wrote an extraordinary three part series discussing the question: "why so many families report being financially less secure even as the nation has grown more prosperous?" If, like most of us, you missed it, go back and look. To its credit, the paper is keeping this older material accessible on its website.