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.

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.

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.

Right now, health care insurers work like a virtual monopoly. They simply don’t compete in many areas. That’s because they are afraid that if one of them starts to clean up it’s act, they’ll all have to follow suit, and that would me lower profits for themselves and their share holders. So you don’t seem them advertising about how they’ll drop pre-exisiting condition clauses, or guarantee that you don’t lose your insurance when you get sick. The best way for them to make profits is to collect as much money in premiums as they can, without paying any of it out. That way, money can be paid to stock holders instead of paying for patient care.

I love the idea of insurance co-ops, and it’s one of those things that should have happened a long time ago. In a co-op, just in a banking co-op, the insurance company will actually be owned by the customers. If you are paying in on an insurance policy, you are a part owner of the co-op. There are no share holders, so all the money, in theory, can be used to run the company and pay medical bills. The problem is that co-ops will be under exactly the same pressures as the private insurance companies. They will quickly realize that they will have lower costs if no one is sick, and since healthy members will outnumber sick ones, it is easy to see what could happen. Insurance co-ops might become even more draconian than the private insurance companies when it comes to trying to keep sick people off the rolls.

The public option would give us an insurance plan run by the government that would never refuse someone, and could provide good basic care at reasonable prices. In order to be attractive, private and co-op insurance would have to beat the public option.

Just by having the option in place, a lot of waste will go away. We won’t have hospitals constantly trying to shuffle poor and homeless people out the door. The hospitals won’t have their emergency rooms crowded with people who may or may not be able to pay. Since people will have insurance, hopefully they will go to doctors before they get so sick they need emergency services. That might actually make it easier to get care

There are a lot of details to be worked out, but I believe that the best system right now would include a public option and insurance co-ops and that they should be given as much freedom to compete against private companies as possible. There also need to be provisions that will keep private insurance companies from just dumping expensive patients into the public and co-op systems. But I think we have a good start here, as long as we hold onto the public option.

Unfortunately, the option I think is the best, a single payer system where we can choose between a number of insurance companies, including public and co-op, but it’s all paid for by the government, is apparently off the table. You don’t hear about this much in the press, but if you look at the boards of directors of media companies and those of pharmaceutical companies, it’s not hard to figure out why. Take a look at this article for more: Single-Payer & Interlocking Directorates

There is a lot that can be done directly, but the various special interest want to cloud the issue so as little as possible is done. For instance, we could simply pass a law that says that insurance companies can not pick and choose. If an applicant can pay the premiums, the insurance company must accept them. No forcing people with pre-exisiting conditions to wait a year or two before they are covered. As long as you make the rules the same for everyone, it would work just fine.

I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty tired of the crap. I’ll be happy to listen to honest debate about real issues, but the truth is that without a stimulus package there is no end in sight for this recession. I might be upset about how much this is going to cost, but I do recognize what the cost in human suffering would be if we sat on our hands and did nothing.

Of course, that’s not really what the Republicans want. That would be madness. It might cost some of them their cushy jobs and there might be a decline in support from their rich buddies. No, what the Republicans really want is to protect their own special interests from the axe that Obama is wielding in order to find the money to fix the problems he’s inherited without digging us so deep in the whole we’d never get out. So the Republicans will scream about spending on volcano monitoring equipment, about replacing federal vehicles that guzzle gas with hybrids and electrics, and about any other line item that they can spin into some kind of look-at-what-they’re-wasting-money-on-now!

Let’s talk about waste. How about sitting on our hands for thirty years after we were shown by the first Oil Crisis, just how vulnerable we were because of our dependence on oil? For all those years, the oil companies have drained money out of our pockets and put it into the pockets of middle-east high-rollers, some of whom like to finance terrorists. The money that paid for the attack on the U.S. on 9/11 came from the U.S., in payments for oil. Take a moment and think about what this country might look like if all that money hadn’t been carried off by the super-tanker load. We would have had money for road work, for health care, for improving the education of our children. We would all be better paid.

If we hadn’t paid for that oil. If we had refused to stay addicted and developed alternative energies, we would still have all that money, and we might not now be facing the climate change crisis that looms over us like a dark and dangerous storm that has yet to break.

Why didn’t we make changes? Because most of the politicians who’ve been in power over the last 30 years have owed allegience to Big Oil. The Bush family got their money from oil. Oil money helped finance Regean’s campaign and that of McCain. About the time it looked like Clinton might have gotten to work on the problem, Republicans suckered him into lying to Congress by questioning him about his affair with an intern. (You should keep in mind, that up until Clinton was questioned, he’d broken no law. He’d just been a cheating pig, which isn’t illegal in this country.) The Republican party managed to keep our former President busy with legal problems, so he wasn’t able to do his job.

That happens too much on both sides of the aisle, but lately, the Republicans seem to have made obstruction and obscufation a science. Even now, they are doing their best to slow the current administration. I dont’ think they have real problems with what Obama is doing. They all know that if they were in his place, they’d be forced to do the same things, but none of them have the guts to admit it. So, instead, they oppose him, for no reason other than he’s not Republican.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll repeat it often. If our politicians can’t begin to place the importance of good government before their own party affiliation, then we will fail as a nation. We will show the whole world what can happen when a democracy devolves into a mindless power struggle. The real shame of it is, we are needed. The U.S. needs to lead the way out of the Climate Change mess. If we don’t, it won’t just be our ideals that are lost, it might be our entire civilization, if not our species and most of the other species on the planet.

I used to think the Climate Change guys were exagerating, so I started reading the actual reports. I learned as much of the science as I could, and tried to determine who was giving me the straightest information. What scares me is that I don’t think the scientists have been exagerating. I think most of them are understating things. Scientists, unlike politicians, live or die based on what they say. The can’t go back and spin the scientific papers they author.

If we let things get completely out of hand and the Ice in Antarctica melts, our species may never see the Earth like it is now ever again. There is enough ice in Antarctica and Greenland to raise the seas at least thirty feet. That is high enough to flood over ninety percent of the populated world. People like to live near the ocean, and most of them do. Even though 30′ might not sound like that much, that would be enough to submerge most of Florida, all of the Florida Keys, most barrier islands, and all the pacific coral atolls. All those people would have to move inland, and they wouldn’t have any resources to bring with them. Couple that with a world population that is still growing and it’s a pretty bad picture.

So, here’s what I’d like. I would like the Republican constituents to have a chat with their representatives about honesty. I believe a healthy opposition party is a vital part of our system of government. That means we need a party that can argue based on the merit of it’s ideas, not on how much it can spin piddling nits into “issues.”

Barak Obama has already performed two invaluable services for our country. By getting elected, he’s helped us take another giant step forward, away from our racist past and into a more accepting future; and he’s set a new standard for honesty and integrity in government. Let’s see if the rest of our politicians can rise to the challenge of practicing politics like a grown up.

Look at the mess that kind of thinking has gotten us into. Our economy is trashed, as is our reputation around the world, several thousand of our children were sent to die in Iraq on the basis of a lie, and we are facing a world wide environmental crisis.

To those of you who have something to sell to the American people, I’d suggest trying a little honesty. It would be refreshing. Even better, it might work. You might find that people are willing to pay a little bit more for products that are peddled using accurate information instead of ludicrous stories and obvious pandering.

On the other side of this equation, I strongly suspect that people are going to become quite vengeful towards those that they feel put them in this position. They are going to wonder why the guy who sold all those sub-prime mortgages has a nice house while they are being foreclosed on. They’ll wonder why the CEOs and CFOs of all these corporations are getting paid bonuses when the end result of the work they did is the collapse of their companies and the world economy.

It used to be that honesty was taken for granted. Maybe we need to work on cleaning up our act and making it possible to live that way once more. It won’t solve all our problems, but perhaps it will make the ones that we have a little easier to face.