The deficit fell fast. As unemployment ebbed, the ranks of long-term jobless calcified, creating two separate job markets. One broken market for people out of work for more than six months. And another slowly healing market for everybody else. But the combination of a thermostatic recovery and a deep aversion to stimulus crushed any hope that the long-term unemployed would get the help they needed. Long-term unemployment isn't special just because it's longer; it's special because it's self-perpetuating. Skills atrophy, networks dry up, and employers discriminate, creating a vicious cycle of joblessness that can't be cured by normal economic growth.

***

This isn't so much a tale of two cities, but a tale of one city that responded differently to two crises: (1) the collapse of the financial system and (2) the scarring of the labor market. These are both emergencies. So why did we respond to the first emergency like an ambulance siren and the second like a harmless murmur of white noise?

I can think of at least three explanations. The first two are the explanations I've heard, believed, and used. The third I hadn't fully considered until last week. But it might be the most compelling.

(1) It's the basic fact that, without a financial system, there is no economy.

This explanation blames pretty much nobody in Washington.

In 2007 and 2008, the entire economy stood on the brink of collapse, and the only way to save it was by a historic all-hands-on-deck response from the Federal Reserve and Congress. In retrospect, you could say that we went too far to protect the biggest banks (some of which are even bigger, today) without ensuring similar financial protection for homeowners. And yet, while millions of underwater homeowners are an acute tragedy, you might say, they won't guarantee a lasting national depression. Without enough gainfully employed homeowners, you won't have a strong housing market. Without a banking system, you won't have a housing market, period.

(2) It's all the Republicans' fault.

This explanation blames half of Washington.

Let's be crystal-clear about this: There is no doubt that Republican policies are disproportionately to blame for the shift away from stimulus. That's an easy story to tell, and I don't think Republicans would even dispute it. After all, they've argued that cutting spending would help the economy. The GOP has thoroughly convinced itself that spending-side efforts to fix unemployment are unworkable.

But there's something else, too.

In the last year, there has settled, even among the Democrats, a kind of reserved defeat that shows a stunning lack of urgency toward the crisis of long-term joblessness. From abandoning the payroll tax cut in late 2012, to quietly acceding to sequester, to going silent on unemployment, nearly all of Washington -- not just the right -- has essentially stopped talking about the most important economic issue of our time.