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.

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.

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.