If your doctor gave you a prescription to improve your health, and it made you deathly ill, would you follow said doctor’s orders to take ever-increasing dosages?

Of course you wouldn’t. You’d label the doctor either an incompetent quack or an unscrupulous shill for the pharmaceutical company; you’d stop taking medicine that was killing you, and you’d seek alternative treatment.

It’s all so obvious: you believe that something will be beneficial, so you give it a try, but once your experience proves that your faith was misplaced — you dummy up. You learn from your mistake and move forward a wiser person.

So, why is it that what seems so obvious in a healthcare scenario, and would also apply without exception if dealing with a mechanic, a lawyer, a contractor, or pretty much anyone else, somehow winds up being lost entirely in the world of politics?

More to the point: how is it possible, after experiencing the catastrophic results of conservative economic policy, that there’s a single American (who’s not either a Republican politician or some other member of the Top 1%) still willing to give the GOP Rx for the economy another nanosecond of consideration?

When King Solomon said that “there is nothing new under the sun,” he couldn’t possibly have done a better job at describing GOP economic policy. From the plans being offered by the illustrious ranks of Republican presidential candidates to those recently articulated by House Majority Leader, Eric Cantor, their prescription is nothing but more of the same poison that crashed the American economy, blew unemployment up to historic levels, and fueled concentration of wealth not seen since the Great Depression.

The GOP Rx for the economy is ever-static and never works. Whether you’re talking decades ago or focused on today, it always consists of the same triple threat to the American people: cut taxes for the wealthy, deregulate, and privatize government along with the commons. They wrap their rhetoric up in a flag, label their plan as “job creating,” and somehow manage to sell the same warmed-over economic Vioxx time and again.

The truth of the matter is that we’ve already tried every element of the Republican plan, all to the detriment of the vast majority of Americans.

According to the GOP, we must lower taxes on the wealthy (a.k.a. the “job creators”) in order to address unemployment. Of course, tax rates today are at record lows with the total income tax burden at its lowest point since 1950 — a fact that begs the question, “Why don’t we already have the jobs?”

Well, the answer is that lowering taxes on the wealthy doesn’t create jobs. It never has and never will, yet whenever the opportunity arises, the GOP snake oil dealers come out of the woodwork offering the same poisonous tonic. Bush did it in 2001, promising 800,000 jobs from his Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act, but the $1.6 trillion tax cut, that gave fully half of the savings to the Top 1%, didn’t actually create any jobs. In fact, following the cuts, we lost 2.7 million jobs by May of 2003.

In contrast, Bill Clinton had the unmitigated gall to raise taxes on the rich, which if GOP prognosticators were right should have been a death knell for job creation. But instead of the Republican predictions of an apocalypse, of a market collapse and dire straits for the economy, we entered into the most prosperous peacetime economy in American history. BLS records show that 22.7 million jobs were created under President Clinton and a paltry 1.08 million under George W. Bush. It seems pretty obvious which president had the better prescription for the American economy.

Once all of the hype is pushed aside, it’s plain to see that tax cuts for the rich have little to do with job creation and instead achieve only the one thing that the average person might expect — they make the rich even richer. They lead to the banana republic style distribution of wealth that now has the U.S. ranking 98^th amongst 136 nations measured by the Gini index of income inequality — worse than Iran — worse than freaking China! But what can you expect when our top 1% now holds more financial wealth than the bottom 95% of the population?

So, maybe the GOP is wrong about tax cuts but right about deregulation. Maybe present calls to repeal Dodd-Frank to “free up Wall St.” are just the prescription for prosperity we need. Maybe there is validity in Michelle Bachmann’s claim that financial reform is “killing the banking industry.” And maybe Sarah Palin will actually run for president, there really is an Easter Bunny, and the GOP truly does give a fat flying flip about working Americans.

The deregulation story is actually scarier than the tax cut myth. It was deregulation that gave birth to the derivative market, allowed unfettered access to credit default swaps, tore down the barrier between investment and commercial banking, and created the Wall St. casino that bled the middle class for 30% of their combined wealth and sent unemployment to levels not seen since the last tax cutting, deregulating, military spending GOP buffoon, Ronald Reagan, sent the rate over 10%.

It was George W. Bush’s dismantling of the regulatory structure that gave us the housing bubble and subsequent economic collapse, allowed the Massey Mine disaster to kill 29 people, and laid the ground work of incompetence that led to the BP oil spill.

Republican style deregulation strips government of its power to carry out it moral mission to protect the people and replaces it with a charade of profit-focused companies pretending to police themselves. It assigns henhouse security to the fox by binding and gagging the farmer. It leads to companies monitoring safety requirements, as it did at Big Branch and in the Gulf, and leaves drug testing to the pharmaceutical companies, as was the case with Merck and their Vioxx pain reliever that caused tens of thousands of heart attacks and strokes, and killed nearly 3,500 Americans.

There are no doubt regulations that do place an unnecessary burden on businesses, and they should be addressed, but they are in the minority. Most regulations serve a vital purpose to protect the citizenry from those who would exploit people and planet in order to add to their bottom line.

Government regulation is as necessary as our system of criminal and civil law. It ensures the safety of our food, infrastructure, medicine, energy, transportation system, consumer products, water supply, and workplace — without regulation we cannot have a functional society. Regulatory reform may indeed be essential, but it must be accomplished intelligently and without compromise that sacrifices the moral mission in exchange for the profit motive. Such reform cannot be achieved through GOP “starve the beast” tactics, where funding for the FDA, SEC, FAA or FEMA and OSHA are indiscriminately cut, nor will it happen through attacks on unions, the NRLB or the EPA as proposed by Eric “Corporate Shill” Cantor and his ignorant mob of Tea Party ideologues.

The Republican plan for America is simple: starve government of necessary funding, cripple government by axing regulations, and turn whatever’s left of government over to private enterprise to milk for profits. They ignore the reality that our economy is stalled because of lack of demand stemming from concentration of wealth not seen since the Great Depression. They ignore science, clutching onto the desperate notion that 98% of climate scientists are wrong about global warming in order to justify their loyal support of fossil fuels. And they ignore the selfish drain on the economy presented by the Wall St. casino and fat-cat government contractors who provide services at rates averaging 183% of the costs to simply hire federal workers.

Sadly, none of this matters to the GOP. When facts get in their way, they just invent another marketing phrase, regurgitate more of their distorted talking points, and spin their poison in populist labels like “liberty” and “freedom.” But in spite of their flag waving and lip service for working Americans, the truth of the GOP is that their core mantra remains “government is the problem,” and they will stop at nothing to deliver on their self-fulfilling prophesy.

Make no mistake about it, the GOP Rx is effective. The problem is that the America it’s intended to serve is comprised of only the top 1 to 2% of Americans. The strength of our nation depends upon both a strong democracy and a healthy capitalist economy. Sadly, the Republican Party is willing to trample the rights of the People and decimate that democracy in order to feed the greed of the economic elite.

Americans need to wake up before it’s too late. They need to smell the burning apple pie, and realize that the parasitic capitalist machine is killing its host. Republicans may still talk about jobs and small business, but it should be obvious to the most casual observer that high unemployment and the lower wages it brings are nirvana for GOP strategists, and real small business is anathema for their vision of an American corporatocracy.

The GOP Rx for our economy deserves a grade of “D” for “Death” of the American Dream. And any working American who subscribes to their prescription and believes that the policies that are destroying the middle class will somehow magically start producing a different result deserves a great big “F” for “Fucking Insane!”

This is one very skewed take on the federal debt issue presented by a very large global investment company with a seriously vested interest, including a major presence in China. While the slideshow pretends to be non-partisan, in reality, it’s a propaganda tool that emphasizes all GOP talking points and glosses over any mention of opposing views.

If you agree with the KPCB take, then the main problem with the U.S. economy is entitlement spending. The slideshow emphasizes this point over and over, throughout the presentation. It also distorts the truth about tax revenue, demonizes government employees, minimizes the impact of defense spending, and makes a series of unfounded comparisons backed by equally illegitimate half-truths.

The following are some specific criticisms:

They assault the growth in government spending by charting the growth starting with the Great Depression: it’s up to 24% of GDP following a 3% trend line prior to 1930 — no shit it grew — there was no prior safety net and no future for anyone but the robber barons and banksters. That’s why we had the Great Depression! The New Deal paved the way and the ensuing period of time following WW2 was the greatest sustained economic expansion in our history — all under a system of shared prosperity brought about through government programs and regulation.

They use the GOP favorite, a family example, as comparison to show what the government should do. Of course it fails to illuminate any of the distinctions between the two very different groups. You know, like one can actually address trade rules, modify tax structures, and print freaking money — or that one is focused on its own wellbeing and the other is supposed to be focused on the wellbeing of ALL the people.

They claim that entitlement costs are rising “exponentially,” which is, of course, true, but still a means of somewhat overstating the issue. Even in today’s sad state of economic affairs, our GDP is presently growing “exponentially” — at a rate of 1.6%, which is pathetic. But the fact that few Americans understand exponential growth provides an open opportunity to exploit their ignorance and make the situation sound as bad as possible. FYI, even the Heritage Foundation estimates claim that entitlement spending will “double” by 2050. I guess “double” just doesn’t sound scary enough.

They label the growth in entitlement spending as a “runaway freight train,” comparing it to the increase in tax revenues, claiming that the former has grown at 2 times the rate of the latter over the past 10 years. Of course, they conveniently leave out anything about the Bush Tax Cuts and the fact that tax rates are at their lowest mark in more than 50 years. Are low taxes really evidence of “runaway” entitlement spending?

They emphasize how large our entitlement spending is by comparing it to the GDP of India, the “world’s 9^th largest economy, but they never state that India’s GDP is only $1.38 trillion, or less than 1/10^th the size of our own.

They attack the entitlements, but they completely glaze over defense spending. They list it as only 20% of the total and $656 billion. Of course, the truth is that when looking at all defense spending, not just the department of defense, the number is over $1 trillion, and is pushing 30% of overall spending.

They chart a picture where defense spending is actually below the statistical average since 1948 as a portion of GDP. Based on said chart, they assert that we’re actually not spending that much on defense. Of course, they chose a period of time that does include the spike for the Korean war and also the Viet Nam war years, but conveniently omits WW2, when spending peaked at 42% of GDP, and they made sure they stopped the chart in 2003 — eliminating the final $300 billion in Bush increases, not to mention Obama’s own.

They also never make any distinction in what might be considered appropriate defense spending between peacetime/wartime, nor do they address differences between wars of necessity versus wars of choice. They also fail to mention that defense spending has actually tripled since 1997, and they leave out entirely the true financial costs of war — those which echo through many facets of the economy and include a huge portion of federal interest payments and are in total estimated to be more than three times the direct costs.

They do mention defense cuts but only the most low hanging of fruit, like the extra engine for the F-35, and certainly nothing like actually ending the wars.

They show the future unfunded costs of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, $35, $23, and $8 trillion respectively, but fail to mention (except in the fine print) that this is over the next 75 years. They also give nothing for comparison, like the fact that at the present rate, defense costs of over $1 trillion each year, which are taken from general revenue, would amount to more than $75 trillion over the same period.

They talk about healthcare costs and results but give only lip service to any real reform that might be made. They make no mention of soaring insurer and pharmaceutical profits, or of the fact that Medicare is prohibited from negotiating drug prices, nor do they mention the 3-6% administrative costs for Medicare as compared to the 12-30% for private insurers. They even understate total healthcare costs at 8.2% of GDP when it’s actually running over 17%.

They present a terrible view of the increase in Medicaid recipients, showing that in 1965 only 1-in-50 people relied on the program compared to 1-in-6 in 2007. Of course they present this as if it were solely an issue associated with program rules and say nothing about the impact of increased cost of living and falling median income and loss of benefits.

They present the only choices to “fixing” Social Security as increasing the retirement age to 73, increasing payroll taxes to 14.3% or reducing benefits by 12%. This paints a pretty bleak picture. But it may not be so bleak when you consider that the tax increase could come largely from lifting the salary cap, or the benefit reduction could apply only to those who are wealthy — or a combination of the two. They also never mention that the program is 100% solvent through 2037, or that it will still be able to pay 78% of benefits beyond that period without any program changes —but then that wouldn’t serve their purpose.

They also make the argument that life expectancy has increased in the U.S. by 26% since the inception of Social Security while retirement age has only gone up by 3%. Now that doesn’t seem very balanced, but of course when you consider that those who actually perform physical work are barely living any longer at all, and that the real increase in expectancy applies mostly to the high income earners who need Social Security the least . . . well, I guess it depends for whom you’re advocating.

They make assertions in pursuit of the GOP agenda item to divert attention from the impact corporate profits and reduced taxation of the economic elite have had on the economy, and they attempt to place the blame on government workers and unions. They actually choose to paint a picture that blames GM’s economic problems chiefly on retiree benefits, and then claim that the company’s recovery was achieved by removing employee healthcare benefits and focusing on quality. Oddly, they never mention the government bailout.

They assert that if a corporation fails to balance its books, they are forced to go out of business, but they neglect to say a word about Too Big To Fail — the socialization of Wall St. debt , the $16 trillion in loans made by the Federal Reserve to the nations biggest banks and corporations at near-zero rates, the auto industry bailout, or any of the billions of dollars in corporate subsidies, which were estimated by the conservative Cato Institute at $92 billion in 2006 alone.

They depict the debt picture in the U.S. by comparing it to other nations and using our gross public debt number, which unlike other nations has the added factor of including inter-government and state-issued debt, neither of which is typical of most other countries. The combination of these two categories is about 30% of the total, which puts the 86% number in a considerably different light. And BTW, even though they chose to use government spending trends from 1930, they fail to mention that the debt to GDP ratio was 122% after WW2 — a number that we paid down with economic expansion and higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy.

They totally distort the tax picture by placing blame on the 51% of Americans who didn’t pay taxes and never mention that the number increased because Wall St. had literally stolen trillions in middle class wealth and crashed the economy in the process, sending 8 million people to the unemployment lines and creating a situation where it was necessary for the Obama administration to extend $288 billion in further tax cuts as part of the much maligned stimulus program.

They assert that the number of people paying 50% of taxes had dropped by 60% between 1965 and 2005. All true, but what they don’t say is that the slice of people making enough money on which to live has also been dropping — that the share of income gouged by the top 1% had grown from 8% in the mid-1970s to 23.% in 2007, and that the median wage fell for the first time in decades under G.W. Bush. They also fail to mention that the corporate share of taxes also dropped from 20% of the total in the 1960s to under 9% in 2010 — from 4% of GDP in 1965 to 1.3% in 2009, which is the lowest of all OECD nations except Iceland.

They present an absurd picture of addressing the debt with tax increases by isolating such measures as a single-solution response. In so doing, the picture they paint is that income tax rates would have to double. Of course, they conveniently ignore any combined solution of spending cuts and tax increases; they completely skim over the potential for eliminating tax loopholes and tax havens, instead offering only the possibility of either taxing healthcare benefits or eliminating the home mortgage deduction — both obviously targeted at raising alarm in working Americans. They also leave out any possibility of limiting the increased tax rates to millionaires and billionaires — you know, like the hedge fund managers, many of whom rake in over $1 billion in a single year and are able to treat their income as capital gains, paying only 15%, while a single person making $35K has to pay 25%.

They speak about government action where “nearly all” Americans will share in the sacrifice, but they don’t want you to consider that what they really mean — when the bottom 98% of us pay the entire price, that is “nearly all” Americans.

Image via Wikipedia

First there was the New Deal, and then there came the Ordeal; now we need the Re-Deal.

For more than four decades after the Great Depression struck, programs based on progressive principles worked to ensure that all Americans shared in the prosperity of our great nation. The rich did get richer, but so did everyone else; fairness and empathy for our fellow man formed the moral foundation of our culture, and together we forged arguably the greatest nation in the history of the planet.

But all good things must come to an end, and that’s what started happening in the U.S. during the 1970s. The oil crisis of 1973, followed by a stock market crash and runaway inflation brought economic growth to a standstill. Productivity actually went backwards in 1974, shrinking by 1.5%, stagflation set in, the prime rate soared, and Americans were left desperate for change.

That change came in 1980. Ronald Reagan was elected in reaction to a stalled economy, the 444-day long Iran Hostage Crisis, and a general sense that America was losing its way. Reagan did bring change, by the boat load, and the short term results were impressive. In direct opposition to the austerity called for by Jimmy Carter, Reagan set in motion the wheels of a fiscally-expansive economic policy that would drop the 13.5% inflation rate of 1980 to just 3% by 1983.

Of course, most of the credit for the drop in inflation belongs to the monetary policies of then Federal Reserve chief, Paul Volcker, but it was Reagan’s combination of increased defense spending, coupled with massive tax cuts that would create a model for the future. Reagan would nearly double military spending during his time in office, while simultaneously ripping away the federal tax base. The result was a tripling of the federal debt, to $2.8 trillion, a dramatic shift that moved the U.S. from being the world’s largest international creditor to the world’s largest debtor nation.

Sadly, not only did Reagan plunge our nation into debt, but he did so as the reverse-Robin Hood in Chief. Establishing tax cuts very favorable to the rich, while cutting social programs and gutting the internal regulatory structure of the government, Reagan was the political godfather of movement conservatism. His policies, coupled with his suppression of union rights laid the foundation for the lopsided balance of prosperity we have today.

But as detrimental as Reagan’s policies were for working Americans, their harmful effects pale when compared to a single tenet that emanated from his bully pulpit — “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

No more destructive words have ever been uttered by a U.S. president. With a single statement, the actor turned president both rationalized his dismantling of social programs and gutting of tax revenues and also disassociated a large portion of the American public from their only means to combat their own demise. As Nobel Prize winning economist, Paul Krugman, once said in reference to movement conservatism, “Reagan taught the movement how to clothe elitist economic ideas in populist rhetoric.”

Once the American public bought into the notion of government-is-the-problem, the die was cast. The progressive ethics upon which modern America was built would soon be trampled time and again. Before long, the only Americans to reap any bounty would be the economic elite, who began to prosper as never before, doing so at the expense of everyone else.

The shift in public attitude was so strong that, in order to gain election, Democrats who once supported progressive principles embraced instead the Third Way. Combining conservative economic policy with a liberal position on social issues, Third Way Democrats are more Republican-light than truly Democratic. Bill Clinton presided in this manner, and as a result is responsible for such anti-worker legislation as NAFTA, as well as a heap of corporate wealthfare in the form of telecom “reform,” commodities treatment that opened the doors to the wild derivatives nightmare that nearly sunk the economy, and the repeal of Glass-Steagall, which removed all remaining barriers preventing commercial banks from playing in the Wall St. casino.

To his credit, Clinton did at least balance the budget and turn over a surplus to his successor. But once George Bush took office, all stops were removed. Without a progressive bone in his body, the younger Bush wasn’t held back by any sense of fair play. He drastically cut taxes, especially for the rich, dismantled the regulatory structure, replacing all key posts with industry insiders, and spent federal money like a drunken sailor. Bush was asleep at the wheel when the Islamic terrorists attacked on 9/11, and again when the economic terrorists on Wall St. attacked in 2008. He opened a new prison for the former and rewarded the latter with a $700 billion bail-out.

President Barack Obama was then elected by campaigning on a platform of “Change we Need.” Obama rode the wave of anger directed at Republicans and Wall St. all the way into the Whitehouse and then quickly proceeded to surround himself with the very people who had orchestrated the collapse.

Another Third Way Democrat, Obama has promoted more aid for those in need than what occurred under the eight years of W’s rule, but he’s also bowed to conservative economic policy time after time. The Obama healthcare “reform” improved access to healthcare insurance, but did so without effectively addressing the related costs. The financial “reform” bill, ostensibly enacted to prevent another banking crash, was passed without provision to deal with Too-Big-Too-Fail or the derivative casino. Most recently, Obama signed legislation providing tax relief to average Americans but not without also extending the Bush cuts for the most wealthy.

The net result of more than 30 years of a federal government divorced from progressive principles is an America more reminiscent of that which created the Great Depression than the one that was created to ensure that it would never happen again. Concentration of wealth today is the worst since the Depression — so bad that the top 1% have leaped from 9% of overall income prior to Reagan, to 23.5% today, and now have more financial wealth than the bottom 95% of all Americans.

The richest 400 Americans now have more wealth than the bottom 50%, while a record number of our people live in poverty, including one in every five children. The robbery of wealth extracted through the subprime mortgage scheme took 30% of all middle class wealth and transferred it to the Wall St. thieves and disreputable brokers across the country. Homeowners by the millions are still facing foreclosure, and many who are not are paying underwater mortgages. Yet the banks are still paying out billions in bonuses, even after being bailed out with taxpayer money, and now account for more than 40% of all American corporate profits.

Meanwhile, the corporate share of federal tax revenues collected dropped from more than 30% during the progressive era to a mere 6.6% today. But even that low rate would present a huge increase for firms like G.E. that just filed its second return in a row where the IRS had to pay them money, in spite of billions in profits. Of course, American corporations responsible for shipping as many as 8 million jobs overseas need their tax savings in order to pay for their CEO salaries that skyrocketed from 24-to-1 in the late 1960s to a high of 431-to-1, before dropping after the banking crash to a mere 319-to-1.

Average Americans would likely cheer the prosperity of the elite, if only a bit of it was shared. But while the rich have been lining their pockets, median household income has now experienced its first decline since 1967, and job growth under Bush was the slowest since 1945. The U6 unemployment rate, which tracks the underemployed along with the unemployed, is still hovering near 17%, and overall participation in the labor force is at its lowest point since 1984.

Politicians say that corporations would start hiring but might need incentives, because their record profits, the highest ever at $1.659 trillion in the third quarter of 2010, just aren’t sufficient. But not to worry, because while the Congress may be in stalemate, the wave of new Republican governors in statehouses across the country are doing everything they can to cut taxes, along with social programs, while waging a war against public employees. Who says we can’t concentrate wealth still further?

We now have a national debt that exceeds $14 trillion, and the clarion call amongst politicians on both sides of the aisle is for austerity, for cuts to Social Security and Medicare and a draconian slashing of social programs of all types. We are in dire fiscal trouble they say, and there must be shared sacrifice — but the only sharing going on is a split where all benefits go to the wealthiest 1% and all sacrifice to the other 99% of us.

There is no excuse for this corrupted mess. The American People have allowed our country to be hijacked by a self-serving elite who deliberately drive wedges into the populace so that we’ll fight amongst ourselves while they bleed us all dry. Hard working people across the nation are struggling to make ends meet while the money changers struggle to find more ways to exploit them. Hard work should be rewarded above clever manipulation. In the words of one of our greatest presidents, a Republican named Abraham Lincoln, “Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”

Another famous Republican, President Teddy Roosevelt, once said “A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy.” Truer words were never said. Progressive principles demand that all citizens work together for the common good. They support entrepreneurialism and prohibit monopoly. They’re rooted in fairness and insist that prosperity be shared. They require that we invest in our infrastructure, and in our people, for such investments form the true strength of a nation.

Progressive principles are about progress, about building a better America. Progress isn’t a dirty word — unless you prefer that things stay exactly as they are. The America captured in the artwork of Norman Rockwell, the America for which so many of us are nostalgic, that was an America built on progressive principles. The Great Depression was that same nation ravaged by scorched earth policies like those in effect today.

Isn’t it time that all Americans ask themselves which America they prefer?

We can work together to end the Ordeal and demand a Re-Deal where all Americans get a fair deal. One nation, one people — we must unite against the evil that’s destroying us; that evil has a name — its name is Greed.

Image by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com via Flickr

If somebody told you that they wanted to lose weight, but they wouldn’t increase exercise or cut their caloric intake, would you believe they were being earnest? How about a friend who says he seriously wants to get out of debt but has no plan to increase income and is only willing to trim the most marginal of expenses? If these cases seem to be obviously insincere, then why does anyone believe that House Republicans have any real interest in addressing the deficit?

Reuters reported shortly after 4:00pm EST on Friday that House Republicans have sharpened their pencils with further slashing in their spending-cut plan that will now total $60 billion. But even at this higher level, which is nearly double their total announced earlier this week, how serious is a plan that will trim the $14 trillion debt by only 4-tenths of 1%? The Republicans are already patting themselves on the back, but since $60 billion in cuts amounts to less than 3 months of interest payments on the debt, should Americans really join the celebration?

The specific problems with the Republican plan are many, but they really all emanate from the conservative framework on which the plan is based. First, and most obvious, is their ridiculous premise that the deficit must be addressed while simultaneously lowering taxes for everyone, including the very wealthy. This is analogous to that person who claims they want to lose weight but won’t exercise — they’ve cut the options in half and in turn doubled the stress on what’s left. With all trimming reliant upon appetite control, dieting starts to look a lot like starvation.

This is far from the way America handled this issue in our glorious past. While climbing out of the Great Depression, our country was hit with the expense of World War II. The economy was invigorated (from forced government spending) and unemployment turned to overemployment. But the national debt, which had been around 43% of GDP, did climb to more than 121% by the end of the war. Undeterred, a united America shared the burden and that debt was steadily paid down post-war, with the debt reduced every year through 1974 (except a slight bump in 1949).

Federal debt bottomed in 1981 at below 32% of GDP, and the remarkable recovery was achieved almost entirely without cuts in spending. In fact, federal spending has increased in all but 4 years since 1947. The solution to the huge debt brought about by WWII was not austerity, but exactly that which Republicans have removed from the table — high top marginal tax rates. The 24% rate in effect when the market melted down in 1929 was raised to 63% in the early 1930s and sat at 81% when the nation went to war. It spent many years over 90% and never dropped below 70% until 1982.

The notion in post-war America was that those who benefited most from our society should give back accordingly. It was an ethic based on the premise of unity, of patriotism and the greater good. The wealthy were taxed heavily on their top marginal dollars, but contrary to the scary scenarios of economic ruin predicted by contemporary Republicans, the economy flourished.

Our economy boomed into the mid 1970s, bringing about a sort of golden age of American capitalism. During that period the GDP multiplied many times over, the middle class swelled, unemployment remained low, and prosperity was shared by most Americans. The rich still got richer, but not at a rate significantly faster than the rest of the populace. Massive concentration of wealth was avoided, and the bottom 90% of Americans enjoyed their peak income year in 1973. Through it all, we remained a country united.

But the sense of unity that had thrived for more than 30 years was lost in the early 1980s. The oil crisis of the 1970s, coupled with a massive influx of imported goods, brought about extremely high inflation and resulted in the heavy loss of jobs. This confluence of events caused the American people to lose faith in the government programs that had given us decades of prosperity, and laid the groundwork for the presidency of Ronald Reagan.

Reagan was elected president by running on a government-is-the-enemy platform. He cut taxes, slashing the top rate first to 50% and later to 38.5%, while also dropping the bottom rate from 14% to 11%. Unemployment was slowly improved, averaging 7.5% for his eight year term, and the economy did recover. But before Reagan left office, he made the unprecedented move of lowering the top tax rate to 28%, while simultaneously raising the bottom rate to 15%.

So began the era of Reaganomics. Hacking the top tax rates while raising the bottom, along with huge increases in military spending and cuts to Medicaid, food stamps, education and the EPA, the pendulum had swung. America became a nation divided between the haves and have-nots, and the national debt began to swell. While the federal deficit had never climbed over $80 billion prior to Reagan, it never dropped below $128 billion during his term. After decades of paying down the debt, it soared from $1.1 trillion under Reagan’s first budget to $2.9 trillion for his last.

Deficit spending had existed under previous presidents, but for Reagan, it was the core of his budget policy. When Reagan left office, he left behind the budget framework for the new Republican Party. That framework is still being followed by John Boehner’s Republican House: lower the top rate, feed the corporations, cut the estate tax, deregulate anything and everything, protect defense spending, and cut whatever else remains. It is under the umbrella of these mutually exclusive objectives that Boehner’s House has created their plan to address the deficit.

The problem with the Republican budget planning process is not just that it exacerbates the deficit problem by insisting on tax cuts for the top 2% of Americans; it’s also the narrow slice of expenditures that they will even consider to subject to their budget knife.

Our federal budget for 2011 amounts to $3.64 trillion. That total is split between $247 billion of interest payments on the debt, $2.1 trillion in mandatory spending (consisting mostly of Social Security, Medicare, and pensions), and $1.2 trillion of discretionary spending. Since the vast majority of mandatory spending comes from entitlements, which are by definition funded outside of income tax revenues, this leaves the substantially smaller discretionary pie from which to cut — and once the Republicans protect their sacred cows, few slices are left on the table.

At approximately 58% of discretionary spending, the price tag for the military accounts for the lion’s share of the pie. This includes around $550 billion for the Department of Defense and another $170 billion for the Nuclear Security Administration, Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs and related programs. Add another $159 billion for “Overseas Contingency Operations” (our Middle East wars), and the Republicans have stashed away all but 4 pieces of that 10-piece pie before it gets served up for cutting.

So, using the Republican framework for deficit reduction, the process starts with tax increases and military cuts pulled completely off the table. That leaves around $441 billion in government spending that’s subject to the Republican axe. Remove from that other Republican pet pots, like the $20 billion or so in oil company and other corporate subsidies, and it becomes evident how much the Republicans are like that person who allegedly wants to lose weight but won’t exercise. It is true that they’re willing to do some dieting, so long as they don’t have to give up any carbs or fat.

The result is a Republican budget proposal that leaves their campaign benefactors happy and instead cuts deeply into programs that benefit the needy and the nation as a whole. Their latest plan cuts billions from education and HUD, slashes more than $3 billion from the EPA, cuts from the FBI, reduces state and local law enforcement assistance, cuts from the FDA, trims nearly a $1 billion for energy efficiency efforts, cuts into science funding, NASA, the GSA, IRS and Treasury, trims the Army Corp of Engineers, slashes over $1 billion from FEMA First Responders, takes nearly $2 billion from job training, and drains billions more from the DOT. At a time of high unemployment and a decaying national infrastructure, over half ($33 billion) of the Republican’s planned cuts are at the expense of  labor and transportation/housing.

This is Republican economics at its finest. Their practices seem more consistent with some sort of Bizarro World Robin Hood, where the hero is actually a villain, and he steals from the poor to give to the rich. This is not the ethic upon which America was conceived. It is precisely the evil of elitist selfishness that the Founding Fathers strived to defeat.

Our present economic woes are not the result of over-taxation or excessive regulation. No, the causes of our nation’s ills are exactly the opposite. Our ailment is rampant greed and a steady decline in the middle class that stems largely from the massive concentration of wealth that’s occurred over the past 30 years. Today, the top 1% of Americans holds more financial wealth than the bottom 95%, and this Republican budget plan is nothing but another dose of the poison that brought us this disease.

Americans do need to be concerned about the federal debt, but the way to address it isn’t on the backs of the poor, working and middle classes. Our shared debt has been much larger as a portion of GDP in the past, and the formula for recovery and prosperity has already been proven. The Republicans refuse to follow that formula because their plan isn’t about the debt. If it was, tax increases and cuts in military spending would still be on then table.

The wellbeing of our nation is at stake, and the Republican House has proven itself to be either disinterested or completely incapable of prescribing the necessary action. It’s time for the American people to stand united and tell these thieves that we’ll no longer stand for their hypocritical nonsense. If they believe the deficit to be a major issue, then address it in earnest. If not, then abandon the false focus and help with the programs we need to create jobs and restore prosperity to the middle class.

Whatever the case — it’s time for all of our elected officials to cease their infernal shell game, stop the finger pointing, and for once dispense with the snow-job and TELL THE FREAKING TRUTH!

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On Sunday, President Obama honored the tradition of presidential interviews being given to the network broadcasting the Super Bowl. Rights for the 2011 edition were held by Fox, and Bill O’Reilly was selected as the interviewer. As might have been expected, the interview that aired before the game was an irritating showcase of rudeness, where Pompous Bill spent 15 minutes interrupting the President (43 times in all) and trying to trip him up.

O’Reilly’s questions started on the topic of Mubarak and Egypt, and the President fielded each of them adeptly, in spite of O’Reilly’s repeated interruptions and attempts to box him into a corner. Having failed to get a reaction on Egypt, O’Reilly moved seamlessly to health care, but only after quickly planting his own opinion on the Muslim Brotherhood: “Those are tough boys, the Muslim Brotherhood. I wouldn’t want them anywhere near that government. Federal judge in Florida said, your health care law is unconstitutional.”

After a brief back and forth on the fate of the healthcare law under the review of the Supreme Court, Mr. Bill took the conversation where he really wanted to drive a stake. Loosely quoting the Wall Street Journal that depicted President Obama as a “determined man of the left whose goal is to redistribute much larger levels of income across society,” O’Reilly asked for a reaction. The president tried to dodge the question, but O’Reilly pressed, “Do you deny that you are a man who wants to redistribute wealth?”

Amazingly, President Obama stepped into BillO’s snare. “Absolutely,” he answered, denying that he wanted to redistribute wealth, and he supported his denial with the fact that he had lowered taxes. O’Reilly pressed again, “But the entitlements that you championed do redistribute wealth in the sense that they provide insurance coverage for 40 million people that don’t have it,” and rather than reframing the issue, the President accepted the pat conservative spin and went directly to defending “Obamacare.”

Make no mistake about it, even though the President held his ground from that point forward arguing certain points regarding healthcare, he missed the opportunity to reassert his previously stated position on taxation of the rich and actually helped to fortify the notion of taxation as redistribution of wealth. As relaxed and articulate as he seemed, President Obama allowed himself to fall into the favorite trap of conservatives — to be cast as a “big government liberal.”

Why Democrats never reject this framing with a legitimate picture of reality, one that’s based on facts and consistent with history, is beyond me. One would think that their only problem would be which conservative myths to refute, and in what order.

Taking on the charge “Big Government” first, it would be a simple task for Democrats to start by offering any one of a number of factual arguments. Each would prove that, to the extent there is a party of fiscal irresponsibility and huge deficits, it’s the Republican Party.

They might base their argument on the debt to GDP ratio resulting from each presidential administration. Going back to the 1970s, that effort would show that Nixon/Ford increased the ratio by .2%; Carter decreased it by 3.3%; Reagan ramped it up by 20.6% and Bush Sr. by another 15%; Clinton brought the ratio back in the right direction, improving it by 9.7%, and GW Bush gave it all back, skyrocketing debt upward and increasing the ratio by 27.1%. The truth of the matter is that all presidents from Truman on have reduced the gross federal debt, except Reagan and both Bushes.

Perhaps pure budget discipline would be a better meter, thereby eliminating the general economy as a variable. Using that metric, one would only have to point out that over the course of the past 100 years, of the 6 presidents presiding over the largest increases in federal spending, 5 were Republicans. Reagan grew the federal budget by 21.9%, and Bush Jr. by 32.2%, both while reducing federal revenues through huge tax cuts — which tends to amplify deficits.

The inescapable truth is that hanging the label of “Big Government” on Democrats is possibly the most unbelievable public relations coup of modern times. It has absolutely no basis in fact. The records show clearly that the Democrats have consistently been more fiscally responsible, and that any connection between the Republicans and small or efficient government is pure myth.

But as flawed as President Obama’s defense of the record was in allowing O’Reilly to paint him as a “big government liberal,” it pales when compared to accepting the paradigm of “redistribution of wealth.” This is classical conservative framing of an issue in order to paint their distorted view of reality.

According to conservative dogma, wealth is earned through the market and later redistributed through taxation and government spending. It has sort of a common sense ring to it, as does the extension of the paradigm — that when the government taxes, it takes what belongs to citizens. Of course, as with all simplistic arguments designed to promote a given agenda, the model presented is fundamentally flawed.

The fact of the matter is that ALL monetary exchanges represent redistribution of wealth, and the government plays a part in each and every one. The issue isn’t whether or not the government should make rules that impact the redistribution of wealth; it does so by default. The question is “should the rules favor upward or downward redistribution,” and on that topic there is a distinct, if shrinking, difference between the two major parties.

Government policies that allow tax advantages for multinational corporations that offshore jobs are every bit as much about redistribution of wealth as programs designed to subsidize the cost of education for low income Americans. The only difference is that the former benefits the wealthy while destabilizing the economy, and the latter benefits the less fortunate while enhancing our national capacity. Republicans are quick to label education spending as “redistribution” but hold tax loopholes as something entirely different — which it’s not.

Instances of this distorted spin on reality are virtually limitless. Healthcare reform, energy policy, mining and drilling regulations, campaign finance, monetary policy, military spending, banking regulation, the list goes on, and in each and every case, government policy will impact the redistribution of wealth. For Republicans, so long as the flow of wealth upward is not impeded, distribution has occurred, not redistribution. This holds true even if it means reductions in compensation for workers, elimination of social safety nets, high unemployment, an under-educated populace — whatever the case may be.

President Obama would have been well served by responding to Bill O’Reilly’s question about redistribution of wealth with a heart felt “Hell yes! But no more than my Republican colleagues — just in the opposite direction” The truth is that government policy over the past 30-plus years has significantly redistributed the wealth of America — straight to the top.

Americans suffered the first decline in median household income since 1967 under George Bush, and meanwhile the average annual income of the top 1% grew by 73%. This is not the result of a free market but rather the result of a rigged market, one that is designed to redistribute wealth in ever increasing concentration amongst the most elite.

Since President Obama didn’t turn the inquiry back on Bill O’Reilly, I’ll ask the question here: how sustainable is an economy that continues to establish policies that have already concentrated more financial wealth in the top 1% than is held by the bottom 95%? I’ll even give Mr. Bill a clue — think Hosni Mubarak.

Article first published as Michele Bachmann’s State of the Union Tea Party Commercial on Technorati.

TeaPartyHD, the television and Internet network responsible for the unseen camera and teleprompter that Michele Bachmann looked toward while delivering her rebuttal to President Obama’s State of the Union address, finally posted their video of the congresswoman’s speech on Friday. And yes, she’s looking squarely at the camera.

So now, with a little luck, this will be the end of media coverage of the strange off-angle shot aired on CNN. In the big picture, who really cares what camera Michele Bachmann was looking at? The gaff made the speech a bit odd to watch, but it really could have happened to anyone. This aspect of the Bachmann story has been given far too much attention — so much that nobody’s talking about the insaniTea of her message.

First off, to call Bachmann’s speech a “response” or “rebuttal” to the State of the Union is to completely ignore everything she said. She didn’t deliver a response; it was nothing more than a rerun of the same fact-free Tea Party commercial we’ve all seen over and again, ad nauseam. It is on this inane content where criticism for the Bachmann slideshow should be focused.

Bachmann wants Americans to blame President Obama for unemployment, so she shows a nice red and blue chart depicting unemployment rates by year. According to Bachmann, the spike in 2009 is Obama’s fault. Of course, she failed to mention that we were hemorrhaging jobs at a rate of 600,000 per month when he took office, and that the economy was in a freefall stemming from the Bush orchestrated bank collapse, but what the heck . . . it’s all fair in politics.

The congresswoman then hit the tried-and-true “attack the Stimulus” chord. The “failed stimulus,” as she referred to it, gave America nothing more than “a bureaucracy that now tells us what light bulbs to buy.” This is a great tactic: just make up your own story, completely devoid of truth, throw in some exaggeration (the trillion dollar stimulus), play upon people’s emotions, ignore the facts, arrive at a hyperbolic conclusion, and BAM — the falsehood lives on. Keep repeating it, and you will gain believers.

This works well so long as the audience just buys the bullshit without checking any facts. But if people have even the slightest inclination to think for themselves, to actually understand the situation, the bald-faced nature of Bachmann’s nonsense shines through. It’s just too bad that so many people don’t care that the Stimulus actually staved off total collapse of the economy — that it added as much as 4.5% to the GDP, saved or created as many as 3.3 million jobs, kept unemployment from climbing to 11.5% or higher, and gave tax cuts to 94% of Americans. If they took the time to know the facts, they’d understand that the biggest problem with the Stimulus was that it was too small.

But the truth doesn’t always play well for the political goals of the speaker, so politicians and pundits are often forced to turn to propaganda — fact selection that results in lying by omission. According to Ms. Bachmann, while there had been “unacceptably high” deficits under the Bush administration, these “exploded” under Obama. She illustrates with a graph showing huge blue bars that tower above the short red Bush deficits, and she assigns all blame for the spending increases on President Obama.

Bachmann’s graph appears to be accurate, but like an iceberg, what’s seen on the surface doesn’t accurately reflect all that’s hiding below. And since the congresswoman doesn’t really want people to recall that her tallest blue bar, the one for 2009, actually reflects President Bush’s budget through October, or that it included much of the $700 billion “bailout” that was passed under Bush, she conveniently leaves these details out. And so what if she failed to mention that those little red bars didn’t include the spending for the two deficit-expanding wars that President Bush chose to keep off the budget. If President Obama didn’t want the billions in war expense reflected in his budget, he should have kept the costs hidden.

But as disingenuous as is Bachmann’s Tea Party spin on jobs and the deficit, there’s really nothing more egregious than the distorted fantasy of fear mongered hype she spewed regarding healthcare reform. In Bachmann’s words, “Unless we fully repeal Obamacare, a nation that currently enjoys the world’s finest healthcare might be forced to rely on government-run coverage that could have a devastating impact on our national debt for even generations to come.” What a crock!

Between Tea Party and more mainstream Republicans, there is no piece of legislation more illegitimately maligned than the Healthcare Reform. Their fallacy starts with erroneous claims about the quality of the American healthcare system, one that consistently produces outcomes inferior to other developed nations, and it always extends to outright lies about the nature of the legislation that was passed.

The truth of the matter is that “Obamacare” is not “government-run.” It’s actually an extension of the public/private system currently dominant in the U.S.. And as far as costs go, it’s designed to reduce them. In fact, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), it will reduce the deficit by $230 billion. And although that doesn’t solve the problem, at least it’s a step in reducing the costs of a system that now outspends the average of the developed world by more than two to one.

Bachmann is right about one thing regarding healthcare, it will bankrupt the country if allowed to continue on its present course. But the issues driving that dynamic are actually made better under “Obamacare,” although not to the extent needed — that would have required the “public option,” but the Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats made sure that didn’t happen. There was no way they were going to do anything to cut into the record profits of the medical insurers and Big Pharma.

Our nation faces serious problems, and President Obama’s State of the Union was light on specifics regarding how he will address them. But unless the American people want more poverty, more debt, more concentration of wealth, fewer jobs, lower wages, and a healthcare system that puts the insurers above the patients, they will do with Michele Bachmann’s “response” what they do with all fecal matter — flush it and forget about it.

Article first published as Capitalism and Democracy, Out of Balance in America? on Technorati.

Accountants, plumbers, teachers . . . lawyers, barbers, technicians — people and societies have many needs and many professions to fill them. If your car’s broken, you take it to a mechanic. If it’s your body that’s ailing, you call a doctor. But what do you do when it’s the society itself that’s in need of emergency care?

America is hurting, and even those who love to wave the flag and speak of our greatness are hard pressed to argue otherwise. We have 15 million people out of work and long-term unemployment at a record high; 44 million Americans now live below the poverty line, with many millions unsure of the source for their next meal; real median household income has been in decline since the turn of the century, and those people now lucky enough to find a job often do so at a significant reduction in pay.

From coast to coast, American infrastructure is in decay, needing more than $3 trillion in repairs. Our healthcare costs continue to spiral out of control, with per-capita spending as a nation more than double the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) average — and in return we achieve inferior outcomes. The federal debt is presently over $14 trillion, about 94% of GDP, and the budgets of 46 states across the Union are in crisis, some approaching default.

Our education system is in disarray; we can’t seem to break our dependence on foreign oil and fossil fuels; we’re destroying our environment with pollution and activities like hydraulic fracturing; the foreclosure crisis is still wreaking havoc on the middle class; our manufacturing base has been decimated; private debt is at an all-time high; our trade balance is upside down — and worst of all — the American people seem more divided than at any time in modern history.

The fact of the matter is that if America were a car, it would be in desperate need of an overhaul; if it were a person, the transplant of multiple organs would be in order. Few and far between are any Americans who would argue that we’re not headed toward disaster, but fewer still are those who offer any real solutions. So, where do we turn for answers? Who do we call?

It is the responsibility of the government to “ensure domestic Tranquility” and “promote the general Welfare.” So, with the domestic climate being anything but tranquil, and the welfare in recent years far from general, it would seem sensible to look to government for leadership — after all, this is the reason for its existence. Our elected representatives are then the people we should call . . . but alas, that really hasn’t been working very well.

The problem is that far too many of those representatives have, in practice, changed employers. They no longer work for the American people. They’re now employed by our nation’s largest corporations. You see, elections are expensive. The 2010 edition ran up a tab exceeding $4 billion. And the sad truth is that the candidate who doesn’t have a sufficient war chest doesn’t get elected. So, unless they’re independently wealthy, candidates are forced to fill their chests with the donations of those willing and able to give. That all too often means taking money from those who the government is established to oversee.

Sadly, for the American people, the average citizen is but a pawn in this national game of influence purchasing. Even the capacity of organized labor, a favorite villain of the right, pales when compared to the might of Big Business to fund elections. In the 2010 campaign alone, business outspent labor by more than 15 times over — paying out nearly $1.3 billion to labor’s paltry $81 million. And make no mistake, those corporate donors don’t support candidates for altruistic reasons — they act only for profits, and they demand favors for their contributions.

Tragically (again, for the American people), many of the corporations controlling Congress actually have no national loyalties whatsoever. In fact, 83 of the 100 largest American corporations maintain foreign bank accounts and shelter their income in tax havens — many paying nothing in U.S. income tax. In fact, it’s so bad that General Electric, fourth on the Fortune 500, made profits of $10.3 billion in 2009, and Uncle Sam wound up owing them $1.1 billion. It’s estimated that companies using tax havens manage to evade more than $100 billion in U.S. taxes every year. The problem is actually so widespread that estimates conclude one-third of all global wealth is stashed in offshore accounts.

The realization that has thus far somehow escaped the American public is that we live today in a globalized economy, and the paradigm that “what’s good for General Motors is good for America” is a relic of times gone by. In all too many cases, what’s good for “American” corporations is actually a poison pill for the average American. And the loss of tax revenues stolen by multinational corporations that use American taxpayer funded infrastructure and services, from roads and utilities to police and fire protection, all without paying their fair share, is only the tip of the iceberg.

All one has to do to see the disconnect between corporate wealthfare and the wellbeing of the American people is to look at Wall Street’s recovery over the past two years and compare it to Main Street’s continued struggle. The Dow Jones, after dropping below 7,000 in March of 2009, was invigorated by the second TARP payout and climbed steadily to finish 2010 at 11,577 — a 77% rise. Bankers rejoiced and passed out record bonuses, $20.3 billion for 2009 and promises of even larger handouts for last year.

Meanwhile on Main Street, 2009 began with unemployment at 7.3% and climbed right along with the Dow to peak in October 2009 at just over 10%. Federal stimulus dollars helped to provide some relief, and 2010 ended with some improvement but still with the jobless rate at 9.4%, and the more reflective U6 rate, which includes the underemployed, stuck at nearly 17%. Yet, as bad as this sounds, the situation is worse still — much worse. The stark truth hidden beneath the published rates is that we now have the lowest labor force participation rate since April 1984 . . . long term unemployment is still rising and people are just not being counted anymore.

And what are those “American” corporations doing? Well, they are creating lots of jobs; it’s just that the majority of them are not in the U.S.. According to the Economic Policy Institute, “American” corporations created 2.4 million jobs in 2010, but nearly 60% of them, 1.4 million went to foreign nations.

Fueled by cheap foreign labor, free trade and government subsidies, the profits of American businesses are soaring. Posting their highest profits ever, $1.659 trillion in the third quarter of 2010, things are good for corporate America. There was a time when that would have translated into prosperity for the average American, but not so anymore. Today, American workers are in a race to the bottom. Their compensation is dropping while commodity prices are climbing. They struggle to provide the basic essentials for their families, while politicians and pundits are increasingly selling the tale of an unavoidable economic shift.

Americans are being sold a bad bill of goods that insists that they accept a new normal . . . one with high unemployment, low wages, weakened social safety nets, and in the final analysis — a lower standard of living. This is the path to continually increasing corporate profits in a globalized economy. Such profits require cheap labor, which means that unemployment will not stem until Americans are willing to work for third-world wages. This is the tyranny of the elite, and it’s a direct result of corporate control of the United States government.

Adam Smith’s invisible hand of the market is alive and well, and it’s painting a new America, one that’s increasingly focused on the wellbeing of We the Corporations instead of We the People. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be this way, but it’s not going to change through the voluntary actions of a government that’s bought and paid for by those who benefit from exploiting the populace.

The bottom line is that Big Business and American politicians have developed a symbiotic relationship that’s poisonous to the people. Big Business thrives on low taxes, deregulation and cheap labor, and American politicians fund their elections on Big Business donations. The quid pro quo in Washington is operating with unprecedented precision, firing on all cylinders and serving well the needs of the economic elite.

The unavoidable truth is that American democracy has let down the American people —there is nobody to call when those charged with service have been corrupted and no longer seek the greater good. So, what do you do when there’s nobody to call? You do the best you can to tend to the matter yourself. In this case, that starts with asking a new question: what’s good for America?

Without doubt, the answer will most assuredly be in perfect harmony with what’s good for most Americans. And as was the design of the Founding Fathers — that will be a society consisting of a strong democracy intended to curb the excesses of its capitalism, not vice versa.

We need to get the money out of politics, and you can help.

Senate Republicans’ “Dr. No” spending hawk warned Sunday that America would experience “apocalyptic pain” with between 15 percent and 18 percent unemployment and that the middle class would be “destroyed” if it didn’t get its fiscal house in order.

“If we don’t fix the problems in front of us everybody’s going to pay a significant price,” Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) said on “Fox News Sunday.”

Bridget Johnson, The Hill

Coburn is just a skirmisher for the battle to come. The lines have been drawn and the strategic objectives set. The Obama tax deal gutted an already hemorrhagi­ng federal revenue base and collapsed the flank for any defense against deep and destructiv­e cuts to the budget that will most certainly be centered in social programs.

The deficit will be back on the center stage but will continue to be defined by Republican­s as a “spending problem.” Tax cuts will be hyped as “job stimulus,” and the vast majority of Americans will be asked to buck up and sacrifice.

It doesn’t matter that the dire straits of our Main St. economy was brought about through the greed of the wealthiest 1%, that a third of the wealth of the middle class was extracted to fill the coffers of rich Wall St. bankers, or that our 17% real unemployme­nt is the direct result of that extraction combined with incessant offshoring of American jobs.

Regardless­, the storyline will be shared sacrifice, but the reality will be that it’s only the bottom 98% who are to share. Listen to the talking heads in the media to see the paradigm is already shifting. They’re talking about “being thankful you have a job” and “being willing to take a pay cut.” It’s all about the “new normal.”

So bend over America — this is going to hurt — but somebody has to pay the price, and it’s not going to be the wealthy, because they own the Congress.

Article first published as Why Don’t the Facts Seem to Matter Anymore? on Technorati.

How do Americans make up their minds on political issues? Some, I’m sure, simply echo the positions of trusted friends. There are people who are persuaded by specific arguments that just seem to personally resonate and still others who simply adhere to strict party lines. Such practices are understandable in the fast paced world of 21^st Century America. But understandable or not, one has to wonder if a more deliberate approach might be warranted.

Take for instance the current debate over the extension of the Bush tax cuts. Most polls previously showed that the majority of voters support extending the cuts for only the middle class. But the margins were remarkably thin and continue to shrink.

The most recent Gallup poll shows only 44% of participants in favor of extensions depending upon income level and tallied 40% in support of cuts regardless of income. An Associated Press poll of 1,000 people, taken just before Thanksgiving, showed a slightly larger margin, with 50% in favor of cuts for income up to $250,000 and only 34% favoring cuts for all income.

Division of this sort is typical on political issues, but what’s interesting about these results is that, while only 2% of Americans would benefit directly from cuts on income above $250,000, a third or more of those polled consistently support those very cuts. This is an atypical disparity that surely must have some explanation.

One possible motivation could be that people are concerned about jobs. According to that same AP poll, 82% of participants cited unemployment as an “extremely” or “very” important issue. Perhaps these people believe that extending tax cuts to the wealthy will result in job creation. After all, anyone who’s listened to the media has heard this argument. It’s a favorite of congressional Republicans, who regularly cast any tax increase as “job killing.”

But the fallacy of such a premise is immediately evident in even the briefest moment of serious contemplation. The fact is that employers simply don’t hire based on their personal income tax treatment. The formula for staffing is strictly limited to the number of employees required to produce the product or provide the services necessary to meet demand while maintaining a profit — period. Profits must be made before taxes even come into play. The fundamental rule is that, if demand goes up, businesses must hire more people, and if demand wanes, there will be layoffs.

I’m afraid that while the don’t-tax-the-job-creators line seems to have some legitimacy on the surface, nobody who’s actually studied the issue believes it. Economists are all forced to agree with Cornell University’s Robert Frank, who sums up the present situation with “Businesses aren’t investing because they can already produce more than people want to buy.” Indeed, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) produced a report on the matter and concluded that, of the top 12 suggestions for spurring job creation, income tax cuts was the least effective option.

So, maybe jobs aren’t the primary concern. Could it be that people are moved to support tax cuts, even for millionaires and billionaires, out of a general concern over the economy? The economy was the highest priority issue amongst those voting in the AP poll. A full 90% of participants ranked it at one of the two highest levels of importance.

There has certainly been enough rhetoric flying around about the detrimental effects of raising taxes on anyone to give ample cause for alarm. Republicans are unified on the topic. The new Speaker of the House, John Boehner, voiced this conservative wisdom in an interview last August, “You cannot get the economy going again by raising taxes on those people who we expect to create jobs in America.” It sure sounds good, but once again there’s no evidence and only rare opinion to support the conclusion.

The fact of the matter is that the American economy is driven by consumer spending. To put that in perspective, around 70% of our GDP is generated thusly. So, it’s actually lack of demand that’s the key issue with the American economy today. Too many people are either without jobs and unable to spend or holding onto what money they have because they’re worried about the future. Businesses are flush with cash but aren’t investing for the same reason. They’re not refraining from hiring because they may have to pay more in taxes. They’re not hiring because there’s insufficient demand.

Tax cuts for the top 2% will stimulate the economy, but the sad truth is that pretty much any other practical option would be more effective. Numerous studies have been completed, and virtually all agree that general tax cuts are the least effective form of stimulus, and those applied to the very rich are the worst of the worst. The CBO study mentioned above again rates tax cuts at the bottom of the heap with regard to impact on the GDP, with a best case of returning $0.40 for every dollar invested. Compare that to $1.90 for increasing unemployment aid, and you might glimpse the insanity of the conservative argument.

Although concern over the deficit is also high on everyone’s list, it’s difficult to see how anyone can argue that extending tax cuts that would trim $700 billion from federal revenue could help the deficit. So, if it’s not jobs, and it’s not the economy, what is the explanation for as much as 38% of Americans supporting tax policy from which they will not personally benefit?

There is one other possibility. It could just be that good old American sense of fair play. When asked how they felt the spending cuts and tax increases needed to address the deficit should be applied, the majority (54%) of participants in the AP poll thought they should “Be spread out so that all Americans share evenly in the costs.” A truly admirable position to take.

But then, just what is it that constitutes an even share? It’s hard to believe that there’s any such equity in extending tax cuts that already provided 52.5% of the benefit to the top 5% of taxpayers. The stark truth is that you cannot achieve an “even share” by extending that which is, by design, extremely uneven.

The facts about the Bush tax cuts are dramatic. They were touted to create jobs and stimulate the economy, yet they did neither. With regard to the economy, the Bush era netted the slowest average annual growth since World War II, averaging only 2.39% per year. And that doesn’t even take into account the economic crash of 2008. The next worst period was 1971 to 1980 at 3.21%. On the job front, the results were even worse, with the Bush era producing the slowest rate of average job growth of any cycle since 1945.

In the final analysis, the Bush tax cuts served but one purpose — to accelerate the concentration of wealth in America. Things have now become so lopsided that the top 1% of Americans now have more financial wealth than the bottom 95%. When the portion of wealth held in home equity is discounted, the top 1% holds 48.4 percent of the wealth compared to 20 percent retained by the bottom 95% — and that gap is growing at an alarming rate.

By 2001, the share of financial wealth had already grown to a 39.7% – 32.5% split, but ramped sharply upward under the policies of George W. Bush. The fact is that the wealth of the very rich is being extracted by squeezing the overwhelming majority of Americans to the point of collapse. The situation is so bad today that 23.5% of overall income belongs to that top 1%.

According to Bloomberg, during the period that followed the first of the Bush cuts, up until the financial meltdown, the average annual income of the top 1% grew from $1.08 million to $1.87 million, an increase of 73%. Meanwhile, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the Bush economic cycle was the first since tracking of the data began in 1967 to produce a decline in median household income — focusing specifically on working-age household data, real incomes dropped by a whopping $2,176.

This is a sad and unethical story, and it’s not representative of the America that most Americans have grown up to love and respect. Our nation was founded on the principles of equality, of shared prosperity and shared burden — principles to which the policies of deregulation and tax cuts for the rich that have dominated the political landscape for the past 30 years are diametrically opposed.

There’s no guesswork here; we already know the outcome of the Bush policies. If the tax cuts are allowed to be extended intact, we will maintain the present trajectory. Poverty will continue to climb; the rich will get much richer, and any balance achieved will be on the backs of the middle class. Make no mistake about it; this is unfair, unethical, immoral, and completely un-American.

Welcome to the real-life tragedy of the commons in America, where the very wealthy have chosen to bleed the country dry, because regardless of the eventual outcome — they will already have their riches. It’s a game of squeeze-all-that-you-can while the squeezing is still possible; it is in essence the great national Ponzi scheme.

America’s economic elite have no interest in reforming the system to achieve sustainability. Our nation, its people and natural resources are nothing more than fodder for the mill of exploitation. And as with any Ponzi scheme, the sustainment of the system matters only to those who have not yet reaped their reward from the extraction.

The American people are the proverbial frogs in the kettle: they continue to support their own demise because they fail to recognize that the heat is still being turned up. If the American middle class is going survive, we will need a 21^st Century awakening. And that awakening must begin with people rejecting the self-serving sound bites of those with their hands on the thermostat.

In the end, the inescapable truth is that, whether the American people choose to recognize the facts or not — the facts do matter. We are presently in a race to the bottom for the vast majority of Americans — and that’s a fact. We can continue this march into oblivion or we can stop the hemorrhaging and restore some semblance of shared prosperity — and that too is a fact. The choice lies with the American people, and the future of our nation depends upon which way they choose — and that’s the most important fact of all.

Article first published as Indictment of the American People on Technorati.

The 2010 midterm election is more an indictment on the American people than the politicians of either party.

The Democrats spent the last 22 months trying to save our nation from the ravages of Republican rule. They made mistakes along the way, but everything they did was a move toward helping and protecting average Americans. Meanwhile, instead of helping to create jobs and restore the economy, the Republicans did everything possible to force extended suffering for their political advantage — tragically, the American people have rewarded them for their treachery.

Way to go America!

For the record, President Obama and the 111^th Congress inherited the worst American economic collapse since the Great Depression. The average American household had lost a quarter of their wealth, $13 trillion in all. The Dow would close at a low of 6,547, with stocks overall dropping from a high of $22 trillion to $9 trillion. Job loss was at 3 million for 2008, and the economy was still shedding more at a rate of over 600,000 per month.

The first action the new Congress took was to stop the hemorrhaging with the federal Stimulus. Split between $228 billion in tax cuts for 95% of Americans, $224 billion in funding to help the unemployed and prop up Medicaid, and $275 billion for direct investment in job creating infrastructure, energy and technology projects, the legislation passed the House without a single Republican vote.

The very same Republicans who had voted in favor of spending $700 billion to bailout Wall Street bankers just three months prior, suddenly became budget conscious and adopted intransigent positions against spending to help average Americans. Republican leaders, including John Boehner and Eric Cantor, rallied to the aid of Wall Street but dug in their heels and fought against helping Main Street.

In retrospect, it’s obvious that the writing was already on the wall the moment that President Obama took office. The initial action of a Republican minority to oppose the Stimulus grew into unrelenting opposition to any form of legislation that would help the American people, impede the unfettered profiteering of Wall Street, or slow the offshoring of jobs.

While the Democrats continued striving to keep the average American’s nose above water, the Republicans did everything they could to make sure they kept choking.

Democrats attempted to address the issue of more than 45 million Americans without healthcare insurance. And instead of working to ensure that any legislation was effective, instead of embracing reform to deal with skyrocketing costs, the Republicans blocked all attempts without compromise. They fought to maintain the profits of healthcare insurers and Big Pharma and instead of helping to govern, seized the opportunity for political advantage with fear-mongering sound bites about the “government takeover” of medical services, death panels and the coming of Armageddon. All incidentally complete lies!

The Democrats later attempted to pass Wall Street reform to prevent a future round of too-big-to-fail collapse and bailout. The Republican response was to meet with the Wall Street bankers and plan their strategic opposition. The bill passed the House, again without a single Republican vote, but it was in diluted form in order to gain any minority support in the Senate.

For 22 months, the Republicans fought every action taken to create jobs. They opposed legislation to address the rising costs of education. They attempted to block Democratic efforts to close tax loopholes and stop the bleeding of jobs overseas. They fought against repairing our infrastructure, against small business aid, against unemployment insurance, against saving the jobs of teachers, nurses and firefighters. They argued against the President’s attempts to hold BP responsible for destroying the ecosystem of the Gulf and blocked efforts to increase their liability limits. They battled against climate legislation, clashed on the issue of gays in the military, and resisted all attempts to require disclosure of campaign funding sources They even opposed legislation to lend aid to 9/11 first responders and stood against extending the Bush tax cuts unless the extension included the richest 2%.

The bottom line is that the Republicans did everything they could, from gross distortion to outright lying, from uncompromising rhetoric to unprecedented filibuster to stop any form of legislation that might improve the lot of average Americans. Their aim was to make things as bad as they possibly could for the American people in order to leverage their misery for political gain — and they were rewarded for it.

Manipulated to feed the source of their exploitation, the American electorate deserves an indictment for societal insanity. But there’s no sense in convening a jury, because all evidence points to the conclusion that the defendant is already brain dead. This is a sad day for America.