Harold Meyerson has the read of the day, about the elites who rule us and their allergy to even recognizing the trouble ordinary Americans face:

Of all the gaps between elite and mass opinion in America today, perhaps the greatest is this: The elites don’t really believe we’re still in recession. Or maybe, they just don’t care.

How else to explain the continual harping on the deficit by editorialists, centrist think tanks and the like when the nation is still enmeshed in the most serious economic downturn since the 1930s? How else to understand the growing opposition to the jobs bills Congress is set to vote on this week, particularly when nobody has identified any future engine of American economic growth save countercyclical public investment?

Meyerson continues that public opinion shows jobs, not the deficit, to be the top concern of everyone outside of Washington elites. They’re worried about job security, they’re worried about wage stagnation, and they’re worried about the tightness of the current job market. They are not worried about a hypothetical future 80 years down the road which may or may not spell slight trouble for Social Security.

We received a valuable lesson about the importance of Keynesian deficit spending when we got back the numbers on the effect of the stimulus package in 2010 Q1. Even in its limited state, with numbers below what economists wanted, the stimulus raised GDP as much as 4.2% in the quarter, lowered the unemployment rate as much as 1.5%, employed between 1.2 million and 2.8 million people and increased the number of full-time jobs by 1.8-4.1 million, relative to what would have happened without it. This is better than projections, and it proves that government spending is both required in a downturn of this type, and successful in stemming the worst effects.

With the unemployment rate still intolerably high, the same kind of Keynesian stimulus, targeted in the short term to increase job and economic growth, is simply necessary. And the deficit hawks shrieking about hypotheticals clearly twist the facts to fit their own agenda, as Rep. Anthony Weiner explains:

Second, don’t believe the hype. Most doomsayers who point to declining Social Security revenues intentionally ignore some basic facts.

They ignore that Social Security is fiscally responsible. By law, it cannot spend money that it doesn’t have. And the Social Security Trust Fund now has a $2.5 trillion surplus that can help pay out benefits for years to come.

Without any change, Social Security could cover three-quarters of benefits until 2083 — when people born today will be 73.

The only way to curtail long-term deficits and ensure a sustainable Social Security system is through economic growth and getting people working again. In the short term, that means federal spending.