[La Lydia]

That is not exactly what he said. I had to snip it. But this is instructive:

States around the country began sponsoring lotteries: government-approved gambling that extracts its largest toll from the poor. Executives and hedge fund managers began bragging about compensation packages that would have been considered shameful a few decades before. Chain restaurants went into supersize mode, offering gigantic portions that would have been considered socially unacceptable to an earlier generation.

[dirtboy]

However, Brooks still misses the larger, key points. Socons railed against abortion on demand, promiscuity, family breakup and other social factors. All of those are close cousins to what Brooks mentioned in the paragraph you posted. Yet he implies the social conservative ‘monitors’ were too busy paying attention to one set of issues and didn’t pay enough attention to the others. But they are all part of the same iceberg - basically, self-absorbed lifestyles, in which the promoters and practioners of which could care less about the wreckage they strew about society.

[Nathan Zachary]

Oh, so brooks blames the government for dangling bait in front of poor people, who of course have no self control at all and therefore aren't responsible for anything they do, like buying lotto tickets and ordering Chinese food.

And large compensation packages of wall street execs cause poor people to order even more chinese food, and buy even more lotto tickets, which just drives the whole economy downwards even further...

Honestly, how this kind of garbage makes it into print is truly amazing. This should be held up by environmental kooks everywhere as a colossal waste of valuable resources, which causes needless deaths of trees which eventually fills landfills.