Of course, if the Super Committee were to be successful at meeting their own goals, the job cuts caused by their cuts would have the same effect, another deep recession.

It makes sense, when you are an individual, to cut spending when your income has been cut. During a recession, tax revenues shrink, starving the government of money, causing additional deficit spending. But, as an individual, when you spend money, it doesn’t directly affect your income. When governments spend money, correctly, it can put people back to work, which generates new private sector spending and tax revenues, which works to reduce the deficit much faster than cutting spending.

To make it a bit more concrete, cutting spending by a dollar saves you one dollar plus whatever interest you would have spent. Right now, interest rates are very very low, so cutting a dollar only saves you a dollar and a few pennies. On the other hand, spending a dollar on creating a job, say repairing roadways, generates money in several ways. Money comes back from income and payroll taxes. Tax payers save money on automobile maintenance, money they can use to buy goods, which helps create more jobs. That single dollar, spent the right way, can generate several dollars in tax revenue.

The point is, not that we shouldn’t deal with the deficits, but that we need to deal with them AFTER we’ve restored robust job growth. If we cut the budget, that will mean massive cuts in public jobs, just at a time when the economy is crawling it’s way towards health. If we wait until we are recovering, then job growth will do most of the work for us, minimizing the pain.

The fact that Congress is back pedaling is an indication that even the Republicans have started to realize just how grim things will be if the cuts are made.

Congress, and specifically the Republicans have been playing Russian roulette with the American economy for far too long. They have purposely been blocking every attempt by the Obama Administration to create new jobs and try to restore some measure of security for every day Americans. This is all due to their obsession with unseating Obama. They know that, historically, incumbent presidents don’t do well when the economy is bad. The Republicans are willing to let you and everyone else suffer for another year, simply to get their hands on the White House.

If that isn’t enough to make you sad, look at who they are offering as potential replacements for Barak Obama. The current front runners in the Republican party are Mitt Romney, who never met a campaign promise he wouldn’t make and wouldn’t forsake, and Herman Cain who is entirely clueless on foreign policy and thinks it makes sense to restrict all Congressional legislation to three pages.

If you care about jobs, please call or write your representative and tell them you want them to rethink the deep cuts in the budget. Tell them that the time to deal with the recessions is after we put people back to work.

Just like Oblivion and Morrowind, you have tremendous flexibility in your choice of character race, class, abilities, and facial characteristics. And, like in Oblivion, you are immediately plunged into the main story line.

In this story, you have to kill a lot of dragons, and the fights have been pretty hairy, but nothing like in DragonAge. So far, I’ve done pretty well against the dragons I’ve met.

Giants are another matter. All they need is one good wack, or stomp, and you become either a human(-ish) missile or giant toe-jam. In one memorable death, my character, Thorn, was hit by an uppercut by a giant and I was still ascending when the game cut away to let me choose to reload.

I’m having lots of guilty RPG-induced pleasure. I’ll write more later.

I believe that the coming cuts will do nearly irreparable harm to this country. It’s another giant step towards dismantling the social safety net that has served to protect those who are displaced by economic changes, unable to work because of illness, or temporarily out of work for other reasons. That net is more important than ever after the financial industry crashed the market, which caused millions of Americans to lose their life savings. The ripples from that disaster are still causing problems all around the world.

While the debt is an important issue, it’s not nearly so important as jobs. Without jobs, there is little or no chance that we’ll be able to grow our way out of this current stagnation.

What we really need are real reforms on the banking industry, a retirement of the Bush tax cuts, and some serious oversight over military and intelligence spending. We need to fund the Infrastructure Bank which would create jobs all over the country updating our dilapidated infrastructure. We need to break up the big banks, so we are no longer put in the position of having to bail one out because it’ failure would be too damaging to the country. We need to break up the telecommunication near-monopolies that have stifled competition, resulting in the U.S. having one of the slowest Internets in the industrialized world.

But the first step is stopping our current death march to oblivion. We need jobs, not budget cuts. Let’s put America back to work, then we can do the responsible thing and pay down the deficit. Providing we can put and keep the “Spend On Credit” Republicans out of power.

I suggest we all pitch a small tent in our front yards along with a sign showing that we support the movement. If you don’t have a tent, put up a sign.

To replace my main drive, I sent off to Newegg for a Seagate Momentus XT, a 500G hybrid hard drive that uses 4G of NAND memory to make it almost as fast as a flash drives, at least on reads. I got my drive the next day, even though I’d paid for standard UPS, probably because I’m in MA. and Newegg ships from NJ.

I have to say, I’m impressed with this little 2.5″ drive. It’s about the size of a pack of baseball card bubble gum. I had to get an adapter to make it fit into one of the 3.5″ slots in my RaidMax Smilodon case. The holes in the adapter didn’t quite line up, but I was able to convince the mounting rails that came with my case to fit into the holes on the adapter.

My computer now boots with pretty incredible speed. I guess I won’t be going off to brew tea each time I start the system up, now.

I also purchased a 2T WD Caviar Green drive, to use for bulk data. I like to play around with graphics and animation and that eats up space fast. Plus, I like the idea of having a drive on which I can back up every other machine in the house.

So far, everything is working fine. Keep your fingers crossed.

I have a two suggestions that I hope will help us see some changes implemented that will address at least some of the problems being protested.

1) Occupy Lobbies – I suggest that the Occupy Washington movement branch out and send people out to the offices of their congressional representatives, where they should get in line and talk to their elected officials. The idea here is to force the representatives to talk to their constituents, not just the lobbyists. If enough people participate, it might even be possible to shut the lobbyists out for a while.

2) Occupy Congress – This isn’t a suggestion that we set up tents in the halls of Congress. What I suggest is that, besides protesting, that those who feel a kinship with the Occupy movement should participate in local government. Find candidates for office you can believe in and help them get elected. If your current representatives are always voting with Big Business, find someone better and elect the, or become a candidate yourself. Ultimately, the way to take power back in a democracy, is to elect people you believe will actually represent your interests.

Make sure this movement does more than generate headlines.

Corporate influence in Washington has been a problem for as long as I can remember, and it’s only gotten worse since the Supreme Court let in all the soft money and Congress failed to fix the problem. Now, as I’ve said before, it appears that money is the only thing motivating the Republican party and the Democrats are only marginally better.

We need real reforms, the kind that Obama promised we’d get. But before we lay all the blame on him, we have to recognize that, by design, the President doesn’t have absolute power. It takes the Congress and the President, working together, to solve the problems we face. When one branch categorically refuses to cooperate, in this case Congress, then we need to lay the blame where it belongs.

We need to eliminate the Bush tax cuts which have helped dig the hole we’re in. We need to limit the size of banks and demand that they hold the paper on loans they make for at least five years, so they can’t abuse the mortgage system like they did before.

I think we need to go farther. I think we need a Constitutional Amendment that would state that corporations are NOT people for the purposes of politics. The concerns of corporations can be properly represented by the stock owners and employees, provided they are citizens of this country. Right now, we allow corporations, some of which do the majority of their business over seas, into our political process.

It’s also time we debunked the idea that the rich and entitled are some magical job creating class. We aren’t the ones who depend on the rich for our existence, they depend on getting us to work for far less that we are worth, in order to accumulate their wealth.

I’d love to see a study done that analyzes what the rich really do with their money. Somehow, I suspect that much of the “job creating” investing that’s going on is happening over in China, not here.

There are lots of jobs to be had here, in the U.S. if only we had the money to fund them. We need to repair the infrastructure. We need to increase the funding for schools and lower the cost of tuition so we can have the best educated populace in the world. We need to find new ways to build more efficient homes, and think about redesigning the way we lay out cities to increase energy efficiency and take advantage of our communications technology. We also need to build out a technology infrastructure second to none, so that our citizens and academics have what they need to put us back in the lead in technology.

Let’s be clear. The 1% of Americans who have the highest income control over 25% of ALL the wealth in this nation. That is the kind of economic disparity that has caused revolutions in other countries. In those revolutions, the wealthy elite lost everything and their lands and money were redistributed. That’s real class warfare.

I don’t think anyone in America want’s to strip the wealthy of all their money. What we want if fairness. Many of the wealthiest Americans were neck deep in the financial shenanigans that have put our economy in peril. During the last couple of decades, while income for the majority has remained flat or fallen, the wealthiest Americans have seen unprecedented growth in their personal wealth. What we want is for those individuals, who are very well insulated against economic hard times, to pay their fair share, the same rates they were paying back in the 1990′s. (They also gained wealth steadily during that time.)

There is simply nothing but hot air to support the claim that raising the top marginal tax rates by 2% will cause any economic slow down. An individual who would normally have $400,000 after taxes, would still have ~$380,000 after taxes under the restored tax rates. While it would hurt to pay $20,000 more in taxes, it’s certainly a lot less painful to someone who still has $380,000 left than it is for me or you.

The Bush Administration saddled this country with two wars paid for on credit, a huge financial crisis that was let simmer until the very last possible minute, and tax cuts which stripped 1.5 trillion dollars of revenue from the budget. Then, to add insult to injury, the Republicans in Congress have been doing their best to slow any economic recovery, so they can use the bad economy for political leverage in the elections next year.

Everyone, Republican voters included, should be mad as hell at the Republican leadership. The first goal of all our government representatives should be economic recovery, not consolidating and expanding their own personal power. The Democrats deserve some ire as well, since they’ve failed to support the president and seem more concerned with preserving their jobs than with the jobs of the voters who put them in office.

I have a hard time believing that we’ll navigate our way out of this problem with the current group of players in Washington. As voters, we need to make it clear that we demand that our needs be the first priority of any elected official.

The “Super Congress,” made up of 12 individuals who are supposed to work out a workable compromise on debt reduction, was created with the understanding that anything they did would have to include new revenue. That’s taxes in normal English. Of course, Baehner now says that he can’t support any measure that increases “job killing” new taxes.

There is no evidence that raising taxes “kills” jobs. Both Reagan and Clinton raised taxes and both had booming economies. All it takes is a bit of common sense to realize that huge cuts in government spending will kill jobs, since the only way to get the huge cuts that the Republicans want, is to lay off people.

The fact is, we’re in this mess, not because of anything that the vast majority of Americans did, but because of the shenanigans of the wealthy who believe that Wall Street is Main Street. Now, when the bill comes due, the Republicans are fighting like crazy to defend tax cuts which were ill-considered in the first place, and which now threaten important social safety-net programs.

Baehner is an example of the worst kind of politician, one who believes that any tactic is justified as long as it puts Republicans in power. He and his fellow Republicans in Congress, are more loyal to each other and their party than they are to their constituents or to the country. How else can they justify blocking every bit of legislation that’s proposed that might help us climb out of this mess? How else can they explain why proposals in Obama’s Jobs bill, which are identical to ones they made, are now a bad idea.

The bottom line is that these people are willing to extend this economic downturn, putting off any recovery, until the next election, in the hope that it will help them defeat Obama and elect another terrible president like Bush, someone who will simply write checks and hand them out to Wall Street with no questions asked.

If you want an economic recovery, you need to make it clear to your representatives that you won’t tolerate this kind of political machination, that you expect your representative to be an advocate for you and your neighbors, putting your interests above that of his or her political party. If you don’t believe they can do that, maybe it’s time to find a better representative.

But, if giving the “Job Creators” a tax break is going to create jobs, where are the jobs? The richest people in our country have been enjoying this tax break since shortly after Bush took office. If this is what gives us a secure and healthy economy, how come we just had a big meltdown? And, weren’t a lot of the “Job Creators” involved in that meltdown?