You’d have to be one heck of a purist to turn down a thousand bucks from Uncle Sam in the form of a payroll tax cut extension just because it might swell the deficit a little. After all, the deficit is some abstract, imaginary thing like the monster that lives under your bed, while we’re talking real money, here. Free money. You can use it to buy food, a couple of iPads, or a mess of lotto tickets⎯which is the only retirement plan many Americans have left these days.

We taxpayers are a little weary of bending over backwards to bail out financial institutions and make sure their executives have a happy holiday, so it’s about time we got a piece of the action, paltry as it may be.

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: GOP kills the payroll tax cut extension" »

Assigning blame to the other side when things go badly and taking credit for good news, even when credit is not due, is the stuff of politics. Any party would and should do this; it’s what parties are for.

Things get tricky, of course, when your victory strategy of hanging responsibility for the nation’s ills on the president involves, in effect, rooting for hard times to continue until your side takes power. It can look a tad unpatriotic, in fact. The only thing to do when rare glad tidings are announced is to keep your mouth shut and hope that unhappier days lie just around the corner.

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: The latest unemployment figures" »

Sometimes you have to wonder if, down deep in their craven hearts, Republican members of Congress don’t regret having made that Faustian pact with Grover Norquist and his no-new-taxes pledge. Here they sit in their cushy jobs, big fish in their hometown ponds, and they uncomfortably find themselves in crisis mode, charged with the mission of saving the country for future generations with their hands tied behind their backs.

Their rational side must know that the only solution to our fiscal death-spiral involves a mix of cuts and new revenue, but they run smack up against that old survival instinct. If they choose to do the statesmanlike thing, it follows that they’ll self-destruct with their constituents.

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: The curse of the "no new taxes" pledge" »

What’s more American at this time of year than heading over to the big box store to pick up an armload of electronics for your loved ones? Think of it as holiday altruism, using our dollars to give a hand up to our little brothers on the other side of the Pacific Rim.

You don’t have to feel guilty about it, because there aren’t really any small consumer electronics jobs left in this country. That “giant sucking sound” that Ross Perot talked about a few years ago has faded away, since there ain’t nuthin’ left to suck.

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: It's beginning to feel a lot like iPads..." »

A couple of points to bear in mind about Greece’s economic crisis:

First⎯as long ago as 1938, when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declared that Czechoslovakia was “a far away country about which we know very little,” the world discovered to its everlasting regret that all nations great and small are interconnected.

Just because we may not count a Greek-American among our acquaintances, or were bored in school when we were taught about Homer’s use of meter, doesn’t mean that the Greeks’ refusal to accept austerity measures won’t impinge on our economy and affect the pace at which U.S. jobs are restored. The world economy is so complex and sensitive an organism that even minor events can have cascading consequences, and the Greek crisis is no minor event.

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: The Greek debacle" »

You’d think that the Democrats, with their ear for the concerns of the common people, would be the marketing experts when it came to packaging the products of government. Not so.

It is the Republicans who have traditionally won the name game, jumping in to re-label a program or tax with a catchy moniker that, by its very utterance, imparts spin in the desired direction. I’m thinking of the “Death Tax,” which, even though it imposes a levy on estates that certainly can afford it, sounds unfair and even immoral on its face. “Obamacare” was brilliant, because it forever welded a program to an individual hated by the base. The Democrats made a double mistake here, first by giving the legislation the dry, bureaucratese title of “Affordable Health Care Act,” and second by not claiming “Obamacare” for themselves, and celebrating it as a triumph.

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: The Social Security increase" »

The Republican Right appears to have an endless, mystifying capacity to blindly vote against its own interests. Herman Cain, the millionaire businessman (and don’t you forget it), is riding at the top of the primary polls right now not because the plan he espouses is best for America, but because he has managed to wrap his oligarchic scam in a Twinkie package irresistible to the base.

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: Cain's 9-9-9 scam" »

Years ago, when I first heard the term, “identity theft,” it had a kind of science fiction ring to it, like a Robert A. Heinlein novel where faceless shape-shifters steal the souls of the unsuspecting and go about the earth performing heinous acts in their name.

When you think about it, that’s exactly what it is, and the crime couldn’t have been committed just twenty years ago, because our vital stats weren’t spread all over the Internet for anybody with basic knowledge to decrypt and misuse on a whim.

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: ID theft on the rise" »

Yes, the demonstrations make for colorful video and a refreshing news break from dreary unemployment figures, Washington gridlock and Republicans’ garment-rending over their presidential candidate field. While our hearts are with the occupiers, we all know they aren’t going to achieve anything meaningful (see my meditation on The Man from a few days ago).

The deck was patiently being stacked during the fat years, when we were all too busy trading our ballooning home equity for flat-screen TVs, new cars and cruises to notice. The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision was the final nail in the coffin for the have-nots. No matter how much money labor unions or public interest groups can raise in an attempt to influence the political process, the super-rich, who always manage to get super-richer no matter what the economy, will be able to spend more.

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: The Wall Street occupiers" »

You think you can beat The Man? Nobody beats The Man. The federal government thought it could. Yessir, it tried to give the economy a boost by slapping a limit on “swipe fees”⎯what banks could charge businesses for transactions made with debit cards.

But The Man doesn’t put up with that kind of sass. He was going to make up that profit somehow, because it’s his right. He came back with blood in his eye and socked the consumer with a monthly user fee for the privilege of spending his own money. So much for good intentions.

It’s like the old days, when we used to pull into gas stations to buy gas, and right there next to a pump was an air hose for filling our tires. That’s right, it was air, and it was FREE, just like air had always been since the dawn of time. Then The Man starting charging a quarter for something that used to be a God-given right. At first, there was a big brouhaha. “Gas Stations Start Charging For Air!” the headlines trumpeted.

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: Debit card user fees" »

“Class war.” How absurd. House Speaker John Boehner has said that pitting different income levels against one another is “not the American way.” He conveniently omits that America has been in a class war for years now, and the top 1 percent has been winning it to the detriment of the lower 80 percent. For his sponsors, it is very much the American way.

Obama’s advisers have tried, perhaps naively, to present the president as a reasonable compromiser, hoping that Republicans would respond in kind. That might have worked 50 years ago, when everybody saw benefit in getting along, but the problem now is that petulance and intransigence have been overwhelmingly effective in today’s politics. All that strategy did was to make him look weak.

The key, then, is to be equally petulant and intransigent, but in a way that resonates with the vast swath of the American people. The top one percent, while they do have most of the cards stacked in their favor, still have only one vote each, just like the poorest among us (at least, those who haven’t been disenfranchised by Republican vote suppression efforts).

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: Obama's "class war"" »

I’ve indulged in a thought exercise lately. What if, in 2012, a disgruntled and notoriously fickle electorate, fed up with high jobless numbers, decided that it had had it with the Obama Administration’s flounderings and voted in a Rick Perry or Mitt Romney as president? What if all the so-called anti-voter fraud laws promulgated by Republican legislatures in the various states worked as intended, disenfranchising core Democratic voters so that both houses of Congress went Republican (and a filibuster-proof Senate were created)?

If we gave the Republicans the full set of keys to the store, with unfettered access to every nook and cranny, what would they do with the privilege? Would they whack taxes on wealthy “job creators” and corporations to absolute zero? After all, if lower taxes theoretically (if not empirically) create more jobs, then logically no taxes whatsoever ought to yield a tidal wave of them, bringing in so much revenue from a newly employed middle class that the ban on upper-level taxes can continue indefinitely.

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: The new poverty numbers" »

When you get right down to it, there isn’t much a president can do to affect the economy in a government that is both divided by design and, as in our current situation, politically.

It ultimately boils down to “optics,” which is political jargon for how something looks to the average citizen—for example, giving a ballyhooed speech in hopes that prospective 2012 voters will come away with the impression that the president actually has his hands on the controls of commerce and is playing them like the stops of a pipe organ.

His only tools—or weapons, if you wish⎯are cajolery and shame. Judging by recent events in Congress with the debt ceiling debacle, cajolery is out as far as Republicans in the House are concerned. They will not countenance anything that might help burnish President Obama’s image with the public, even if it happens to be best for the country.

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: The President's big jobs speech II" »

This is one of those times in our nation’s history when I wish women were running things. No, by that I don’t mean that through some cruel twist of fate, a President Bachmann faces off against a Speaker Pelosi after next November. Those two ladies have lived and succeeded in the cage match of Washington politics for too long, and already have too much testosterone thumping through their veins.

I’m talking about sensible, mature women who don’t view the stewardship of this country as a zero-sum game. The kind of women who first sit down together and pull out pictures of their grandchildren, ooh and aah over them, and then leave them out there on the table so that they never forget what their meeting is really about.

After the pleasantries, they listen carefully to each other (an art which has been lost of late), take all their concerns into account with respect even for those they don’t agree with, and work out a way to make things happen where everybody wins something. It is possible, if one keeps one’s eye on the ball rather than on one’s own ego and the scoreboard.

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: The President's big jobs speech" »

In case you had any doubts about who pays the freight when it comes to congressional Republican tax policy, just sit back and enjoy the breathtaking hypocrisy as Republicans try to defend the indefensible.

The same tea partiers who practically brought this country to its knees a few weeks ago by refusing to make any kind of revenue increases a part of the deficit reduction mix seem to have gone into mass catatonia when it comes to defending an extension of the payroll tax deduction. As one of them put it, “Not all tax relief is created equal.” The same way not all paychecks are created equal, we’ll have to assume.

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: Payroll tax hypocrites" »

Remember President Obama’s campaign promise that he was going to “change the way Washington works?” Unfortunately, he fulfilled it. Who’d have thought we’d be pining for the good old days back in 2008 when the parties in Congress couldn’t agree on anything, but at least one of them didn’t have a death wish?

One can probably lay the rise of the tea party at Barack Obama’s feet, not for anything he did or didn’t do, but for who he is. There’s nothing he can do about that, but there is something he can do to lead this country, which is to stop pussyfooting around trying to appease its adherents.

Instead, he can stand firm and push a sweeping, budget-busting, comprehensive public works program, whether he thinks he can get it past Republicans or not. If he can rally Americans behind him on this, he will prevail, because it makes sense that getting people back to work eventually reduces the deficit.

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: The hope and change president" »

Well, they did the unthinkable. Standard and Poor’s gave us the shaft. In the suspenseful lead-up to the final debt-ceiling bill, the more conservative Republicans in Congress were talking tough and allowing as how a downgrade, or even a default, didn’t matter all that much. It must matter to them after all, the way they’re now heaping blame for it on President Obama.

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: America gets downgraded" »

Wall Street has spoken, and it doesn’t like what Washington has wrought. There are other complicating factors, like deep problems with the economies of foreign countries, but Wall Street’s biggest beef, and that of the American public, is that we all understand we have a government of a few hundred people who don’t play well together. In fact, the issues they’re dealing with are far too important for playing or gamesmanship, but they seem to be the only ones who don’t understand that.

We can only hope that those who are not off on foreign “fact-finding tours”⎯doing field studies on the ground of, say, the Parisian or Venetian tourist economies⎯will be back in their home districts with their ears peeled. There, they might learn that over 70 percent of the nation feels that increased revenues, particularly on the part of those who pay so little, should have been a component of their unholy debt deal.

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: Wall Street reacts" »

We already know that the Republican Party isn’t interested in saving the economy. It’s really interested in exploiting the opportunity presented by a bad economy to push through a long-awaited and –cherished agenda. Otherwise, why would it fight tooth and nail to pass a deal that virtually guaranteed more jobs would be lost? Why would it agree to a so-called “trigger” mechanism that amounted to more cuts than it even achieved during the first round, without painful tax loophole closures? Please, please, don’t throw us in that briar patch!

A secondary benefit to throwing the economy a life-saving cement block is that it ensures the nation will still be struggling to come out of the morass by November 2012, paving the way for even a nonentity like Mitt Romney, should he be nominated, to attain the White House.

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: An unorthodox funding idea" »

One of the reasons that revenue increases were taken off the table in the recently passed debt reduction deal is that Republicans contended they were a job-killer. As Rep. Barney Frank said the other day, the contemplated increase would have amounted to $30 per $1,000 earned by those who make over $250,000 per year, including millionaires and billionaires.

It’s hard to believe that the “job creators” would change their hiring plans over that amount, but the Republicans would have you believe it, anyway.

Instead, Congress just passed a deal that, by slashing spending on government discretionary programs, is a true job-killer when what we need in the short term are more jobs and more people paying taxes rather than acting as a strain on social safety-net systems.

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: The congressional sausage-making process" »

As of this writing, it looks like the debt ceiling mess has finally been resolved, after a fashion. It’s great if you’re a tea partier. Unfortunately, most Americans are not tea partiers, so the majority did not rule in this case.

The Founding Fathers were fortunate enough to live during an enlightened period of intellectual development now dubbed “The Age of Reason.” Reason was revered as the most sublime characteristic of the human animal, the apotheosis of that which separated us from the beasts. “Je pense, donc je suis,” or “I think, therefore I am,” was the proud acknowledgement that man was capable of ordering his universe neatly and fairly according to a gift that all humans were born with, like opposable thumbs.

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: The debt ceiling crisis II" »

It’s the financial stigma Republicans won’t talk about, and average Americans won’t remember because it happened before last week.

It was the golden son, George W. Bush, who inherited a humming economy and a surplus from his predecessor. Thanks to his bumbling, and that of the two houses of Congress his party owned for six years⎯we squandered our wealth and undercut our revenue base to the point where yahoos elected in a reactionary wave to the appalling spending spree now threaten to ruin the reputation of the country we all love. The only silver lining to the crash having happened in late 2008 is that there is no way it can be blamed on his successor⎯President Obama’s detractors have to content themselves with attacking him for cleaning up the mess too slowly, and (horrors!) for spending more money in the process.

Meanwhile, President Mission Accomplished slumbers on, enjoying the undisturbed, dreamless sleep of the benighted.

If you’re a Latino in this country, you or someone you know or love may well have an immigration problem. Unless, of course, you’re a Cuban-American.

The official Republican view of Latino migrants is xenophobic and borders on racist. Since Latinos often don’t speak our language all that well when they first arrive, and they don’t resemble the people who disembarked from the Mayflower, it's easy for GOP pols to demonize them as the dreaded “other,” terrifying the local folks with talk that our culture is being overrun by furriners while simultaneously reaching out for political contributions.

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: Latinos get shafted" »

The contours of this debt ceiling battle, at least the congressional portion of it, now appear to be developing around two kinds of lawmakers: the professionals and the amateurs. The former, the so-called “adults in the room,” are aware that the structure of a viable democracy is rooted in the bedrock of compromise. The latter are those who were sent to Washington by an angry electorate with a simplistic mandate to fix things once and for all, then leave.

Fix-it-and-leave sounds like a noble undertaking, and comports with the Founding Fathers’ idea of the clear-eyed, pragmatic citizen-legislator who laid down his plow, his adze or whatever, and journeyed to the national capital to serve his country for a short period before returning to his vocation.

That was back when the fundamental unit of government was the state. The federal operation was so insignificant that had it defaulted, it probably wouldn’t have made any difference to the average citizen, nor would other countries have even paused in their endless cycle of European land grabs to take notice.

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: The debt ceiling crisis" »

From a political junkie’s standpoint, we here in South Florida are treated to a deliciously abrasive congressional combination⎯adjoining districts represented by Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a proud liberal and chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, and Rep. Allen West, the tea party champion who has been touted as Republican Vice-Presidential material.

The other day, the antipathy the two harbor toward each other exploded on the floor of the House, when Ms. Wasserman Schultz expressed her incredulity that Mr. West, a congressman from this senior-rich area, would pursue with such alacrity the cutting of entitlement programs upon which so many of his elderly constituents depend.

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: The West/Wasserman Schultz flap" »

It helps to look at the tea party congressional freshmen, who form the core of the opposition to a sane, reasonable resolution to the debt ceiling problem, the way one looks at terrorists: individuals who are so committed to their cause that their own martyrdom in its service is considered an acceptable sacrifice.

These are especially dangerous groups, because in the past both the political process and the nation’s security have been predicated on the idea that the actors wish to live to see another day. When some guy lights his shoe on an airplane, or pursues a catastrophic political course in the name of his dogma without caring if he’s reelected, it becomes much more difficult to defend the established order.

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: Tea party bomb throwers" »

It’s like the movie, Chucky. The ventriloquist’s dummy acquires a vengeful mind of its own, and turns on its masters.

Chucky is today’s tea party. Created, bought and paid for by corporate and Wall Street fat cats to keep their taxes down and enable them to maximize the accumulation of wealth, the puppet has begun doing its job too well. It has taken the tax pledge so much to heart that it has now painted itself, its patrons and the nation into a corner of its own making.

Frantic letters are being sent and backroom pressure applied by worried plutocrats, calling upon the tea party freshmen to bend on the tax issue and avoid a default. “For God’s sake,” they plead, “don’t kill the goose! If you push this too far, the economy will crash, and that won’t be good for anybody. Even we won’t be able to weather it. We’re willing to take a small hit to keep the golden eggs coming!”

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: Rogue tea partiers" »

Normally, inter-party one-upmanship in the halls of Congress is, like polo, a spectator sport that appeals to only a slim cohort of the general public. It shouldn’t be this way, but what with the demands on the average citizen’s time of making a living, raising a family, and other mundane tasks, most of us (unless we watch this stuff for a living) only have the luxury of tuning in for a couple of months right before a big election.

Unfortunately, the latest “crisis,” which could result in the nation’s default, is much more serious that usual and warrants our full attention. If we stop paying our bills on time, we will lose our worldwide financial credibility. For starters, we’ll have to pay more to borrow money from our Chinese bankers, for example, and everything we want or need is going to cost us more. Are we ready for a permanent recession?

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: Tea party plays with matches" »

“When each side starts to care more about reducing our country’s debt than about advancing its own political agenda, we’ll finally make some progress.”

I don’t remember who said it, but it applies equally to both parties in congress. It’s all about fear…of the electorate. Not much about the daily give and take on Capitol Hill manages to percolate down to the proletariat, but we have just seen what happens when somebody threatens one of America’s great socialist programs, Medicare. Since that little stumble has now tarred the Republicans, Dems are delightedly standing back, washing their hands, and letting them hang themselves. For the moment, entitlements have become untouchable.

On the other side, Republicans owe much of their legitimacy to holding the anti-tax line. They doggedly hew to the long-discredited Laffer Curve, which posits that removing the fetters of taxation stimulates greater economic activity, thereby creating more revenue. We’re still waiting for that one to pan out in field trials.

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: Debt ceiling paralysis" »

I wouldn’t want to be in Mitt Romney’s shoes right now. The punditocracy is pushing the conventional wisdom that, despite having an empty account in the personality bank, all Romney needs to do is trumpet his business experience and sit tight while the economy continues to tank. No amount of Obamic charisma and charm will be able to save a president who can’t deliver the goods. In frustration, we will even turn to a stiff like Romney to save us. At least, that’s the theory.

Neither the chatterers nor Romney appear to have thought this thing through. Since he’s offering little or nothing in the way of specific solutions to our economic problems, what remains is a strategy that consists of betting on the president to fail. Unfortunately, if Obama fails it means the country has failed as well. This puts Romney in the uncomfortable position of cheering for higher (or at least, sustained) unemployment and deepening misery.

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: Mitt Romney, the Wild One" »

“Concurrency.” It’s one of those awful bureaucratese words that cause the average citizen to instantly flip to Dancing With The Stars.

Which, of course, is what the pols are counting on. Loosely translated, it means that when developers create whole new communities out of swampland, they are required to build roads, schools, sewers and other infrastructure to service these communities as they go, by adding surcharges to individual units.

Well, they were required. Thanks to our Republican super-majority business-friendly legislature that just adjourned last week, we the taxpayers will now have to pick up the tab for those frills. The legislators also stripped the state of growth planning oversight, putting it back in the hands of local government, which is much easier for developers to control through judicious use of campaign contributions.

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: Developers gone wild" »

The first polls are out since the unveiling of the Ryan Plan and the Obama response to it. It appears that a majority of Americans are in favor of including an increased tax rate on those making over $250,000 per year as part of the deficit-reduction mix.

Democrats favor it overwhelmingly. Republicans less so, but it’s still a majority. Even rich people favor it. They have said they feel they ought to pay more, but no one is asking them to. The only ones who don’t favor it are the Tea Partiers, who are against raising taxes of any kind, but these same Tea Partiers have indicated in the same polls that they don’t want Medicare to be fooled with. So they shouldn’t be taken seriously, anyway. You can’t have it both ways.

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: Tone-deaf Republicans" »

Even the most rabid deficit hawks might want to leave the FAA budget for air traffic controllers intact. In fact, they could take a few bucks from, say, ethanol subsidies and slip them the FAA’s way, as far as I'm concerned.

It’s enough that anyone who is really determined can figure out a way to get explosives onto a plane, or that we never know if the last half of our flight might be in a convertible. The knowledge that only one controller staffs the tower at Reagan National after dark, and that he is asleep, can collapse the entire house of cards the airline industry and our government have carefully built to keep us flying and paying those outlandish fees.

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: Controllers asleep at the switch" »

The Tea Party-backed House freshmen have gotten themselves into a nice fix. They thought they had everyone by the short hairs by threatening not to raise the nation’s debt limit. Now that Standard & Poor’s has come out saying the U.S. might lose its AAA debt rating for the first time in history thanks to their shenanigans, they’re starting to look like the skunks at the ball.

The raising of the debt ceiling, as any informed person knows, is about acknowledging the fact that we have overspent in the past. The money’s gone already. If you want to have a fight about future spending policy, make it over next year’s budget…don’t hold the country’s creditworthiness hostage over spilt milk.

But the bumpkins back home don’t understand that. They elected these folks⎯some of whom have no experience whatsoever in government, not even at the local level⎯to say “no” to everything having to do with spending. It sounded so simple when they were campaigning, didn’t it? We’ll go up there and show those slickers in D.C. how wise us folks out in the boonies can be.

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: The Tea Party and the debt ceiling" »

There were elements of President Obama’s budget speech that left us wanting more, but in one area he delivered. He was right to cast the coming battle over the deficit as a moral issue, since the main battleground will be entitlement programs like Medicaid and Medicare, which exist because at the time of their inception, this nation felt an obligation to fulfill a moral imperative.

The Republican Party, particularly its Tea Party wing, is making an amoral, purely financial argument. The argument is simplistic and cunning, yet does not stand up to the test of the American character.

One thing everyone agrees on is that the deficit must be reduced. How it is done will depend on who is able to make the most compelling case to the American people. Republicans, in their zeal not to raise taxes on anyone⎯particularly the wealthy⎯will continue to push the discredited notion that by removing any financial fetters from the well-off, we will stimulate an economy that will float all boats.

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: Gutting Medicare II" »

President Obama was giving his deficit reduction speech while I was inking this cartoon, and among his proposals were the expected ones about raising more revenue by closing loopholes and hiking taxes on the well-to-do.

Two questions immediately came to mind: First, why did it take so long for him to bring up the dreaded tax issue? He (and all of congress, except for a few lefties in safe districts) allowed the entire shutdown debate to continue with no mention of “revenue enhancement.” It was all about cost cutting.

Is the American public really so selfish, so irresponsible, that it cannot understand that the beneficence it has enjoyed for so long needs to be paid for somehow? And if not by us, then by our children? And is it so dense that it doesn’t understand that raising taxes on those who make over $250,000 per year is different than raising taxes on the middle class?

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: Tax day for the rich" »

I know, I know. Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan to lower the national debt has about as much appeal as algebra homework, but
I assure you you’ll start paying attention, particularly if you’re under 55 years old, when Congress begins haggling over the Medicare portion of his proposal.

The old Republican principle about turning everything over to the private sector doesn’t work so well when you’re talking about an elderly cohort that’s guaranteed to be sick, often catastrophically so. This is why spreading the cost out to all the taxpayers makes so much sense: the government can’t turn anyone down. Sure, the program is full of flaws, but consider the alternative.

Republicans will quickly cave over this, because the backlash from pushing it would make them an extinct species in Congress. If you’re going to wake the American body politic out of its stupor over an issue that directly affects its self-interest, make sure it’s the other guy’s fault. This will be the Democratic strategy (“What? You want to cut Grandma’s lifeline so Wall Street fat cats can take another round-the-world cruise?!!?”).

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: Gutting Medicare" »

Rep. Paul Ryan has just submitted his Great Republican Economic Plan for America’s Future, and there’s a great deal of ink being spilled about whether it’s visionary or just another Trojan horse. I’ll leave that to the pundits and pols who’ve actually read the whole thing.

The part that shouts out to me, as it should to everyone else, is the lowering of the tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent. This includes you and me, as well as billionaires. Why does the American public remain so quiescent in the face of such injustice? Not all republicans are super-rich. Is the average voter that easily distracted by the culturally conservative candy the GOP tosses out every two years to placate him during the brief moment he becomes politically engaged? What happened to economic self-interest?

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: The GOP deficit reduction plan" »

A recent poll has found that if the Florida gubernatorial election were held today, an overwhelming number of Floridians would vote for Alex Sink over Rick Scott.

This says a lot more about the electorate than it does about Scott. It isn’t as though he pulled a bait-and-switch. He always said that if he became governor, he would run the state like a business. We all knew that the business he ran paid a record fine to the U.S. Government for fraud, and we knew that he had no experience whatsoever in government. What more did we expect?

Scott’s idea of cutting corporate taxes at a time when Florida desperately needs revenue is so unrealistic that even the Republican legislators can’t swallow the trickle-down myth. They have to balance the budget, and even the most conservative Republicans know⎯deep down in their granite hearts⎯that generating revenue by creating a more favorable business climate would take more time than they’ve got. Besides, with lower taxes, you’d have to see some pretty phenomenal corporate growth for such a folly to pay off.

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: Rick Scott's tax cuts" »

As if it weren't traumatic enough to watch the numbers add up at the checkout line scanner, our intelligence gets insulted by the ever-shrinking cans, the cereal boxes with two-thirds "product settling," the 1lb. pasta boxes and coffee bags that now say "12 oz." in small print, the spice jars with labels all the way around so you can't see how empty they are, and the "30 per cent water" on the meat packages.

After all that, they have the gall to raise the prices on those things, too.

Will they never learn?

We’ve had troops mired for years in two theaters, and they’re spread so thin that the stress of repeated tours of duty is breaking them. Just a couple of weeks ago, the Secretary of Defense said that anybody who considers getting involved in another Middle East conflict ought to have his head examined.

Yet, the armchair hawks in congress are ready to go to war all over again in Libya, and they have the gall to chastise the president for moving too slowly. Sure, it plays well back home, where people are screaming about gas prices. But it’s President Obama who, if he gets us involved militarily, will be lying awake nights with those lives on his conscience.

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: Send in the Marines?" »

Rick Scott⎯being both mega-rich and the former CEO of a health insurance company, (a) no longer knows what matters to average people, and (b) probably wouldn’t care if he did.

He is able to navigate in that ethereal world divorced from the daily concerns of basic survival and getting along in a community with one’s neighbors. In fact, Rick Scott can hole up in the governor’s mansion, dream up all manner of unworkable ideas and attempt to foist them on the state of Florida, like Lex Luthor from the Superman comics working his will on a miniaturized version of Metropolis that he has imprisoned inside a corked water cooler bottle.

The members of the legislature, most of whom are also Republicans, view the affairs of state through a much more mundane prism. Unlike Scott, who apparently isn’t concerned about getting reelected to a second term, they not only want to remain and prosper in politics, but they must also return frequently to their home districts to face constituents (a notoriously fickle lot).

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: Tallahassee two-step" »

This is what the Japanese dared to start a war over, back when they created the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in the 1930s.

Since the island nation lacked raw materials of its own, it determined that it was of vital national interest never to let its economy be held hostage to a shortage of natural resources and commodities.

Japan’s methodology in subjugating and brutalizing the peoples of a vast region was contemptible, but at times like these we can certainly appreciate her motives.

We like to think of ourselves as the most powerful nation on earth, yet our fragile economic recovery risks being strangled by, of all things, the reluctance of a semi-obscure North African madman to vacate his seat of power. Every day that he counterattacks and digs in is an extra day of turbulence and uncertainly in the world’s oil futures markets, with direct consequences to the prices of everything we consume here at home.

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: Gadhafi and fuel prices" »

Here we go again. We’ve been through so many gas price boom cycles that we know the script by heart: The lefties will say “We told you so,” and call for fuel tax hikes and business credits to be applied to developing alternative sources of energy, and they’ll get nowhere. The conservatives will first figure out some way to blame Obama, and once they’ve dealt with that priority, they’ll call for planting rigs right on Waikiki Beach if that’s what it takes to become energy independent.

Hardly anybody ever talks about this topic when fuel prices are low. That, of course, would be the best time to slap on a federal fuel tax, when it would do the least damage to the economy. Nobody in congress is willing to commit political suicide just yet, however. Better to play it safe and wait, so that high prices caused by disturbances in Libya, of all places, will result in our paying the same kind of “tax,” only to the Saudis and Venezuelans rather than to Washington.

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: Oil prices spike" »

At first, I was sympathetic to the standard line about the Wisconsin public employee unions, the one the Republican Party has been peddling.

It’s the time-worn narrative that resonates with us private-sector taxpayers, who like to visualize outfits like AFSCME as a litter of oblivious piglets blissfully nursing at the public teat while the rest of us disorganized drones tighten our belts.

But then, I began hearing that the Wisconsin unions had searched their souls, and had done what other public- and private-sector unions have in hard times past, which is to give up some of their sweet benefits for the greater public good. They’re taxpayers too, after all.

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: Wisconsin's labor pains" »

Suddenly, people like House Speaker John Boehner are learning the hard way that the Tea Party-backed wing of his caucus not only means to stay true to its rhetoric, it doesn't feel it owes the old paternalistic party apparatus any fealty. The Republican side of the house is starting to look more like the Democrats: a coalition of pressure groups obsessed with different core issues that pull together now and then to scratch each other’s backs when it suits them. More often than not, they bicker amongst themselves.

Just yesterday, a group of Tea Party fiscal conservatives allied with Democrats to finally chuck a redundant, gold-plated jet engine that even the Pentagon says is a waste, but that has survived for years because the manufacturers spread the work around to as many districts as possible. The engine is assembled in Boehner’s home district, for crying out loud.

What kind of Speaker can’t even protect federal pork in his own district? Actually, the very question itself is so last-year. It reflects an archaic, old-politics viewpoint, one that prevailed before the seeds of the whirlwind Mr. Boehner is now reaping were sown.

Boehner's only hope is that, over time, Washington culture will work its evil charms on his irksome band of zealots before they bring the whole carefully-designed traditional structure crashing down around his ears.

Are you sorry you voted for Rick Scott yet?

What was he thinking? More important, what were you thinking? Here was a man with a completely unproven record…well, at least, in government. Unfortunately, his record in the private sector says a lot of things about him that should have caused you to pull up short before connecting that arrow on the ballot.

He’s decided to allow the running sore of pill mills to continue infecting our state (because they’re a tourist draw, I suppose), and now Mr. Seven-Hundred-Thousand-Jobs-In-Seven-Years has disdained $2.4 billion in federal gift money on the tragically incorrect premise that it will cost Florida taxpayers more than that in matching funds.

And that’s just in one week. This guy is worse than incompetent…he’s malevolent. I thought Scott was all for helping private enterprise create jobs. A consortium of business groups is ready to match the federal money with private investment, and they’re contractually bound to make up any overages out of their own pockets. Where is the risk to the taxpayers?

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: Scott derails hi-speed train" »

When I was in college, I took one of those “Physics for Poets” classes designed for art majors and other people who couldn’t count without using their fingers and toes, and who needed to fulfill a science requirement in order to graduate. Oceanography was an alternative, but it was already sold out.

Our professor opened his first lecture by saying, “This is how light travels.” He then scrawled out a ludicrously complex equation on the blackboard containing arcane symbols, superscripts, and for all we knew, Jane Fonda’s measurements. He whirled around to face slack jaws and a few signs of outright panic. “Okay,” he nodded sagely. “No more numbers in this course.”

Applause.

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: The Obama budget" »

The release of the state budget is normally pretty dry stuff… little more than bedtime reading for Tallahassee reporters and policy wonks.

Since Gov. Rick Scott and the Florida Legislature are all cost-cutting Republicans anyway, we would expect the newly minted governor’s proposed spending plan to glide through the corridors of the state capitol easier than a lobbyist in a new pair of Guccis, right?

Wrong. We must remember that for Scott, this gig is more or less a very expensive hobby, and he may not care whether he gets reelected in four years, having grown weary by that time.

The rest of our public servants do care, and they know that Scott’s draconian cuts aren’t going to go over well with the voting public, who will surely blame them when education and children’s services, for example, begin to shrivel on the vine.

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: Gov. Scott's budget" »

The concept of teacher merit pay appeals to our Republican legislature and governor because it makes sense at a surface level, is a neat, simplistic solution easily comprehended by the public, and has the added benefit of weakening the hated teachers’ unions, which are part of the power base of the Democratic Party.

From the teachers’ point of view, there is no allowance made for students’ sheer stupidity, bad luck of the draw in one’s class roster, or working in schools whose families find it more difficult to spare the time to get involved in their children's learning.

It is true that unions are formed in order to collectively assure that workers receive compensation in line with the work they perform. Without unions, each worker must negotiate alone, and historically, that has led to exploitation.

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: Teacher merit pay" »

Much as it pains me to agree with Gov. Rick Scott on anything, I have to admit that his idea to require workers on the state pension system to contribute five per cent of their salaries toward their retirement packages makes sense, particularly in this time of financial tribulation.

Frankly, it came as a surprise that, up until now, they have had to make absolutely no personal contribution. Those who set up the system, in their wisdom, left that burden to the taxpayers.

To those of us who work in the private sector, particularly in the age of the 401(K), the idea of the personal contribution is as much of a given as the medical insurance co-pay. It’s pointless to complain, because that’s the way it is and there’s nothing we can do about it.

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: Scott targets state pensions" »

The outcry over the U.S. Postal Service’s rumored closing of 2,000 post offices over the next two years reflects our dismay at the prospect of yet another slice of Americana fading into the miasma of rotting memories⎯like the ice-man, the gas station attendant and the bootlegger who made backdoor house calls.

The notion of the village post office⎯the warm, welcoming community center housing a half-bespectacled postmistress who knows everyone in town, as well as their business⎯is an indelible component of the national myth.

If you grew up in a big city like I did, your memories of the post office don’t reflect the same rosy, gemütlich glow. The lobby of my post office always smelled like a colony of feral cats lived behind the heating grate, and the sullen, silent lines of frustrated customers shuffling forward while slab-faced postal clerks served them at mollusk-like speed made the visit seem more like an episode of The Twilight Zone than The Andy Griffith Show.

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: Post office closings" »

How long do you think the outbreak of brotherly love between the parties is going to last? Well, let’s call it the appearance of an outbreak. As we know, in Washington it’s all about projecting an image for the day’s news cycle.

My guess is that we’ll be treated to some unlikely seating arrangements during the State of the Union Address (i.e. Schumer/Coburn), and then things should rapidly deteriorate to normal.

Republicans are, no doubt, heeding the latest poll numbers, which show President Obama’s approval ratings surging. If their past behavior is any indicator, they’re heeding them and coming to the wrong conclusions.

Obama’s newfound popularity is originating from the public perception that he has begun constructively engaging his political opponents for the betterment of the country. He does this whether the opposition likes it or not, and it has taken them tactically by surprise.

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: Big mob bust" »

So the Republicans have dutifully thrown the Tea Party people their bone. Yes, it was absurd and a waste of time, and while the Republicans won’t talk about it openly, they know just as well as everyone else how foolish it looked to pass legislation that was going nowhere.

These are the same people who accused the Democrats in the last Congress of putting their own agenda ahead of that of the American people, which purportedly consisted of jobs, jobs and jobs. This is why they inserted “job killing” into the title of their legislation, as a head fake toward relevance.

They were paying off a political obligation, and one must fulfill one’s promises. Yesterday’s vote, however, doesn’t eliminate the crosscurrent that the establishment GOP finds itself caught in.

The whirlwind that was unleashed at last year’s town hall meetings may have been directed at Democrats, but the Tea Partiers are still angry, they have no party loyalty, and they know when they’ve been played. They are not going to be satisfied with a mere kabuki dance and then quietly go back to their caves until the next election season. They will continue to clamor for the meaningful action they feel is their due.

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: The Obamacare repeal vote" »

First, a postscript concerning yesterday’s topic: Evidently, the country is so rent asunder that we can’t even agree on which version of the Constitution should be read aloud for the Republicans’ stunt in the House of Representatives.

They’ve decided to read an amended, Bowdlerized version, which edits out the infamous “three-fifths compromise” in Article One, wherein members of Congress are to be apportioned to free men, excluding Indians, and counting “all others” (meaning slaves) as three-fifths of a person. Rep Jesse Jackson, Jr. of Illinois wanted it read, but the Republicans would have none of it. And you thought the document was sacred.

Meanwhile, as we helplessly watch gas prices shoot up again, and wonder why we didn’t unload that behemoth in the driveway when we had the chance, some observations:

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: Fuel prices spike" »

Can you say, "jobless recovery?"

I have admitted before that I'm no economist, but I simply can't grasp, from a linguistic standpoint, how the two words can exist side by side. Maybe people who are disconnected from daily reality, like our members of Congress, can understand it.

In any case, have a Happy New Year!

This cartoon is pretty self-explanatory, so I won’t muddy it up with more commentary.

In an act of cross-pollination that would bring tears of joy to the eyes of the Sun Sentinel’s online editor, our award-winning business writer Paul Owers will be posting the above effort on the blog he co-authors, House Keys, as a Christmas gift to his long-suffering readers.

I say “long-suffering” not because of Paul’s writing, but because his job is to chronicle in exquisite detail the flounderings of the South Florida real estate market, which is one of the engines that drives our local economy. Well, it would be, if somebody hadn’t stolen the spark plugs.

If you wake up in the morning with a case of what Alan Greenspan once called “irrational exuberance,” one glance at Paul’s blog will immediately set you back in balance. I work about six feet away from Paul, and by the time he’s through doing the phone reporting for a story you want to slit your throat. Frankly, I don’t know how he manages to maintain his sunny demeanor in the face of such relentless bad tidings.

In any case, the black humor of this drawing, I feel, is a perfect fit. Since our readership probably doesn’t overlap much, we thought it might be a good idea to give each other’s blog a holiday plug.

And on that note, I’d like to wish my readers a better year in 2011. I think we all deserve it.

Suddenly, now that the grand bargain has been struck over the Bush tax cuts, we don’t hear any whining out of the Republicans about budget-busting programs.

Remember, before the midterm elections, when President Obama was getting blamed for every penny of the deficit? It seems that since $700 billion of new debt is being incurred to finance tax cuts for the Republican Party’s most important constituency, the deficit is no longer a problem.

Oh, and let’s not forget that to Republicans, tax cuts don’t really have to be offset to balance the budget the way government programs have to be. You see, in the fantasy world of the Laffer Curve and Trickle-Down, tax cuts more than pay for themselves in increased economic activity. Just ask George W. Bush (but don't ask his father, George "Voodoo economics" Sr.).

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: The tax cut deal spreads the joy" »

If there were any doubts left in the minds of average Americans that congressional Republicans have made the servicing of their wealthy paymasters a higher priority than their solemn oath to serve the people, then yesterday’s vote on Social Security should have laid them to rest.

At a time when the cost of living for such necessities as medicines has been steadily rising, the Republicans’ sudden desire to deny a mere $250 special payment to the elderly and disabled is not just a display of cynical party politics, it’s inhuman.

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: GOP gives seniors the shaft" »

The Democratic base can go ahead and scream that Obama caved on the Bush tax cut extension, but the fact is that the Republicans were going to go to the mat on this one, and the President knew it.

Making sure that corporations and the rich pay as little in taxes as possible is the core reason for the Republican Party’s existence. For Republican members of Congress to give an inch on this matter would be tantamount to throwing up their hands and admitting that they are just being obstructionist because it’s fun.

If progressives think that they can shame Republicans by staging populist votes of principle that highlight their allegiance to the wealthy over average, unemployed Americans, then they are being naïve. When it comes to this issue, there is no shame. This is existential. As Deep Throat once said, “Follow the money.”

Besides, the GOP has an ace in the hole. There's all that other stuff⎯the social issues like prayer in the schools, the death penalty, abortion, gun rights, gay bashing⎯that’s just cotton candy the GOP picked up along the way to entice the rubes in the hinterland to vote against their own economic self-interest.

It’s been working, too. Wave the prospect of, say, gays getting married in front of some God-fearing, churchgoing taxpayer, and he won’t see that behind the curtain, his earnest, sincere vote to “take America back” is being twisted to empower cynical plutocrats who are happily picking his pockets.

Barack Obama’s greatest handicap is that, as President, he must be concerned with the welfare of all Americans, not just the ones who can buy influence. The Republicans, not being burdened with that responsibility (and moreover, not caring if everybody knows it), will always hold the strongest hand in negotiations.

You would think that one of the most important roles government can play is to act as a safety net for those who are out of work through no fault of their own.

You would think⎯now that the financial types who caused the economic meltdown have been made whole, are thriving, and are once again awarding each other obscene year-end bonuses⎯that the victims of their greed would finally get their turn at the trough to lap up what few slops were left.

You would think wrong, because our Republican friends in Congress have suddenly found religion when it comes to making sure things like unemployment benefits extensions aren’t given out unless they’re paid for in some other way.

Like so many newly minted converts, Republicans are selective in their fiscal sanctimony. They have no problem with extending unfunded tax cuts to those so wealthy they would barely notice them, anyway.

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: Unemployment benefits expire" »

This is an update on last year’s cartoon, where I first introduced the turkey dog as a visual metaphor for the Great Recession.

In the 2009 version, the dad was nostalgically showing the family a photo of what Thanksgiving dinners used to look like. This year, since the recession is technically over (at least, according to the bean counters) he’s cutting it up and distributing the trimmings.

On that note, a Happy Thanksgiving to all Lowe-Down readers!

That the Wall Street plutocrats should get more than their fair share in both fat times and lean…it’s the way the system works, so we might as well get over it. The eternal imbalance is why the groundlings invented the concept of the Day of Judgment.

Looking at the other end of the scale, however, it isn’t just selfishness but a moral injustice that the unemployed should have their benefits curtailed when they most need them.

After all, it’s the financial industry that got us into this mess. Certainly, they who possess plenty beyond anyone’s mortal need ought to allow themselves to be taxed so that the victims of their greed might at least buy food for their families.

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: Extending unemployment benefits" »

Have I told you already that this guy is fun to draw?

Aside from the shiny pate, which opens things up to all manner of visual humor, there’s the dark, brooding, Karloffian stare that we haven’t seen in a Florida governor since the days of Bob Martinez.

Anyway, much as I’m going to enjoy the next four years with Governor Scott for selfish reasons, I’m still left scratching my head as to what logic lies behind his claim that starving the schools is going to help create jobs.

It would seem that the mediocrity of our state educational system is one of the impediments to industries locating in Florida. After all, if your workforce can’t be properly trained for lack of, say, reading comprehension or math skills, no amount of industrial tax breaks is going to change your mind. Unless, of course, you import your labor from Iowa or some other state willing to tax itself in the name of quality education.

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: Rick Scott, Gov. Slice 'n' Dice" »

Are you good and angry about how those buffoons in Washington never seem to make any progress on deficit reduction? How they can’t manage to curb their wastrel ways, even though the money they’re blowing has to be borrowed from foreigners?

Well, shelve it. What would you do if your employer told you your job depended on how well you could plow through money to buy things that pleased him?

And what would you do if, at the same time, your boss wrote in your annual evaluation that while you were servicing him so effectively, he was getting ticked that you were busting the budget? And that if you didn’t cool it, he’d replace you with an employee who was less of a spendthrift?

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: Deficit reduction folly" »

My favorite period of any election cycle is the first few days after the polls have closed and the outcome is decided, when the party that won drops the façade and begins carefully recalibrating its campaign rhetoric to reflect reality.

This is when we find out how they really plan to use their newfound “mandate,” and what they admit that they can’t possibly do and never really thought they could but didn’t want to tell us until it was too late to take our votes back.

Continue reading "Chan Lowe: Post-election reality check" »

Reduce the deficit! Halt runaway spending! Starve the beast! Shrink government! It’s time to take our country back!

All lovely-sounding slogans, designed to snag votes. Something that House Speaker-elect Boehner and the rest of the Republican establishment know, however, is that actually making good on the exhortations is a much tougher proposition than shouting them out from the cheap seats.

We have learned from this election that in these times of extreme hardship, the American people are nothing if not impatient. It doesn’t matter who got us into the mess, it only matters that two years have passed since the last election and things aren’t getting better.

The Republicans and their Tea Party wing did an admirable job of getting themselves elected without having to delve into specifics. Let’s face it, there are two ways to reduce the deficit: raising revenue and lowering expenditures.

Since a Republican House will never raise taxes, that leaves cutting programs (the part they avoided talking about during the campaign). The military and national security are off the table, they tell us, so that leaves…

Social Security? Can’t cut people already getting it, or even people who are old enough to smell it. They’ve all paid into the system already. Young people? How can you expect them to keep paying in if you welsh on their future benefits?

Medicare? “Huh, whassat? We’re gonna have to start paying for Grandma’s dialysis? NO WAY, BOZO!”

And--finally--earmarks, which amount to almost nothing compared to the rest of the budget, anyway. “You mean we ain’t gonna get that civic center (or fairgrounds, or underpass, or highway spur) our congressman promised us after all?!!? We’re votin’ Democrat next time!”

Congratulations, Mr. Speaker…and our condolences.

No one should be surprised that mortgage lenders have displayed the same devil-may-care attitude toward checking their foreclosure paperwork that they did when they made the loans in the first place.

It isn’t as though they’ve gotten soul transplants over the last three years since the boom went sour.

If you find yourself gripped by anger and frustration over what these cowboys have done⎯and continue to do⎯to our country, it helps to think of them as cockroaches.

Cockroaches are perfectly evolved life forms. According to scientists, they can survive anything⎯including nuclear Armageddon. When you leave out food and turn off the lights, they head for it. When you turn the lights back on, they scatter so fast you can’t possibly destroy them all.

This is what they are programmed for. It is all they do. They cannot change, for if they did, they would no longer be cockroaches. If you could somehow inject a sense of ethics into them, they would become ensnared in moral dilemmas over their behavior and die of starvation.

For this reason, we cannot judge cockroaches by accepted codes of human conduct, because to do so would presuppose freedom of choice on their part.

Until Armageddon occurs, we will always be in uneasy coexistence with the pests. That being said, we are under no obligation to encourage them in their activities.

So if we forget, say, to snap the lid down tightly on the Tupperware, we have nobody to blame but ourselves when they start feasting on the family pot roast. They just can’t help it.

The American body politic⎯quiescent, even oblivious in normal times⎯is restless and fearful due to economic uncertainty. In its currently aroused state, it has become prey to cynical self-interested forces. When people are angry, they are easily led.

For example, if it is a tenet of faith of one particular group that climate change is a myth, it makes sense that shadowy petrochemical plutocrats, who have so much to lose from environmental regulation, would give behind-the-scenes financial support, through patriotic-sounding front organizations, to candidates who espouse a laissez-faire regulatory philosophy (To the big money backers, all that Libertarian stuff about individual rights and Second Amendment gospel are window dressing. Being billionaires, they can simply buy all the rights they want).

Their shills in the media and in politics, all of whom have so much to gain, willingly spread the party line (As Deep Throat said, “Follow the money”). Their legions of listeners hunger for easy answers, which are cheerfully supplied in large helpings.

In the final days before the midterm elections, President Obama is playing catch-up, campaigning hither and yon to defend and explain his vision for the country. He and his party might not be in such a jam today if they had taken the trouble to do the plodding grunt-work of repetitive indoctrination from the beginning.

His opponents certainly did.

They must think we voters are stupid, and maybe we are.

Poll after poll shows that when Americans are asked what bothers them the most about their government, it’s that it’s too big and it’s spending too much. Running up debt to China that our children will have to pay. We gotta rein the sucker in somehow.

Then these same Americans are asked what government programs they’d like to do without. Social Security? Hold on a minute! I paid in to that. They can’t steal it from me now. Medicare? What, and make me cough up for Granny’s doctor appointments? Obamacare? Gotta say, I like the sound of that preexisting conditions stuff. Unemployment benefits? Not if I’m the one who’s out of a job. Et cetera.

On top of that, we all want to extend the Bush tax cuts. Some have even bought into the idea that if we extend them for the rich as well, they won’t bank the difference or buy an Italian yacht with it, but instead will plow the loot back into jobs (maybe they’ll hire an extra couple of undocumented landscape workers to tend their estates).

The goal, for those who tease us irresponsibly with notions of reducing the deficit, is to somehow glide through election season without having to divulge the truth: that it can’t be done without pain, and a lot of it.

They know that if they really begin to do everything they say, voters will scream bloody murder as their favorite handouts get gouged. They’ll take it out on the perpetrators next time around anyway, so why tell them the truth now?

Better yet, once the elections are over, why do anything meaningful at all? That deficit stuff was all just rhetoric; any smart person ought to know that. The ones spouting it certainly do. Stalling has worked pretty well for us up until now. Let's keep on kickin' that can down the road.

And, when all else fails, blame Obama. Twenty percent of Americans are willing to believe anything you say about him. That’s a good solid base to build on.

The most offensive thing about Spirit Airlines’ charge for overhead carry-on luggage is that now, the house always wins.

At first, the company spiel sounds plausible; keep base fares low by charging for virtually everything that doesn’t directly affect getting you there. The airline is banking on the fact that while the flying public may be alienated at first, we’ll eventually become inured to the concept, just as we have to the myriad other indignities they’ve forced us to endure over the years.

It’s easy to rationalize the checked-baggage charge; after all, it costs money to process that luggage and then lose it for you. But carry-ons are just that. Maybe it costs a little extra fuel for the airline to hoist it aloft, but certainly not the amount they’re charging. You must either check or carry on, unless you want to wear multiple layers of clothing with toiletries stuffed in the pockets.

Spirit is also not discounting the rumor that, once the technology is in place to make human interaction a luxury item, they will soon charge you to talk to an employee at the airline,

Think about that for a moment: Isn’t having to pay to speak to an employee really just the same as phone sex?

Except that there’s no payoff.

This isn’t about whether teachers are worth more than they get paid. Of course they are. A lot of people are underpaid for what they do.

It’s about realizing that when times are tough, everybody has to tighten his belt a little; we can’t go on demanding things as if we lived in a vacuum.

We would all love to give teachers a raise; Lord knows they deserve it. But to do so means that more revenue must be found—this isn’t the federal government where we can just appropriate where necessary and let the Chinese pick up the tab.

We find the money by hiking property taxes on everyone, including private-sector workers who haven’t seen a raise in a long time and who consider themselves lucky to still have jobs.

As homes are foreclosed upon, counties and school districts with basic overhead expenses find themselves forced to lean on the remaining property owners, including those who don’t have the benefit of unionized collective bargaining to put the squeeze on their employers.

In other words, for teachers to get more, other already-strapped workers must get by with less. Surely, no one should feel that entitled, no matter how worthy his calling.

If Conservatives in Congress really feel that extending unemployment benefits will break the bank, why is it so incredibly difficult to find the means to pay for it?

Here’s an idea right off the the top of my head, and they don’t even have to give me credit: Why don’t we eliminate government subsidies for oil companies to drill in this country and off our shores?

Does an oil company that makes a profit of several billion dollars per quarter really need an incentive from the U.S. taxpayer to keep drilling?

Here’s another: The U.S. Treasury now has an agreement with Swiss banks to flush out American fat cats who stashed their wealth over there in order to avoid paying taxes. It has offered the scofflaws amnesty if they ’fess up and pay up now, rather than face prosecution later. Can you think of a more appropriate use for this sudden windfall?

Need more? Force American companies that base themselves in places like Dubai to pay their fair share of U.S. corporate taxes if they want to do business in this country.

Wow! That was so easy, it clearly can’t be a lack of resources…it’s more like a lack of human decency.

One thing a crisis like this teaches you is that⎯unlike civil law⎯ the law of economics is not predicated on fairness.

When things began to go south back in 2008, business started shedding jobs like a dog does fleas…which, of course, worsened the problem.

Businesses⎯with the possible exception of some outfits that treat their employees like family⎯do not operate based on humanitarian motives, nor should we expect them to. There are economic necessities, period.

The cold reality of economic downturns, though, is that businesses eventually get used to making do with fewer employees.

When the recovery finally begins, it obviously makes sense⎯particularly if an employer is still unsure⎯to increase the workload of existing employees rather than spread the burden by making new hires, whose benefits will cost him a lot more.

Hence, the “jobless recovery.” As the economy chugs along, some people have more money to burn, and they use it to buy things, but few new workers get absorbed into the growth.

It’s too bad that our political system follows a two-year cycle. It took a lot longer than that for us to get into this mess, but we expect our leaders to get us out of it within that trial period. If not, it’s time to throw the bums out.

That’s where economics gets human: at a time when we're buffeted by forces we can neither understand nor control, it's nice to have somebody to blame, even if it isn't the right person. After all, it's what we pay them for.

What recession?

The iPhone 4 phenomenon is proof of what the theorists say, that we could easily spend our way out of this slump if we really wanted to.

The eighty-nine percent of us who continue to be employed (for now) are sitting on our money out of fear that we may really need it someday.

We put off buying that new air conditioner, or roof, or car, for better times, and those who would make these products we normally purchase get pink-slipped.

Then along comes a gadget which projects such talismanic appeal that people are willing to camp out twelve hours or more before the stores open so that they can be the first to spend several hundred dollars on it. To possess this thing, they will joyfully throw all caution to the wind.

It’s clear that all we need to rescue ourselves from the Great Recession are more irresistible products whose mere ownership induces the same euphoria, and—voila!⎯unemployment is banished.

Can’t you envision it? The iGarbage Disposal, the iFurnace, the iRiding Lawnmower. The manufacturers simply pay Steve Jobs a small licensing fee for the privilege of sticking an Apple logo onto whatever it is they make, and then sit back and wait for the iSheep to line up around the block.

There's probably an app for that.

What are you Tea Partiers worried about?

Crisis after crisis, the one common denominator that keeps popping up is that some government regulatory or enforcement body was incompetent, asleep at the switch, or incestuously intermingled with the industry it was meant to oversee.

When Washington displays this kind of ineptitude regarding the fat, easy targets, how can it possibly get its act together enough to intrude upon and control the lives of its individual citizens?

Congress can pass⎯and President Obama can sign⎯all the “socialistic” and “Nazi” laws they want to, but when the black helicopters land in your back yard and they beat down your door, it sounds like all you have to do is provide some booze, broads, and a few lines of coke, and they’ll be putty in your hands.

If it’s the SEC that concerns you, then simply tune your laptop to some hot Internet porn. That ought to keep ’em distracted for a while.

As for protecting our borders, local law enforcement in places like Arizona will be so busy mistakenly rounding up suspiciously ethnic-looking American citizens that the real illegals will slip through to Colorado, Kansas and Minnesota faster than a personal injury lawyer can file a false arrest lawsuit. If you aren’t brown and don’t have a Mexican accent, they won’t be interested in you.

So chill.

I knew that if I just waited long enough, that art history degree would finally come in handy.

For most of us, myself included, macroeconomics is one of those subjects the experts natter on glibly about and win Nobel Prizes for, while their discipline inhabits some abstruse, ethereal level rarely gazed upon⎯and even more rarely comprehended⎯by us working stiffs.

You’d think, though, that the folks who managed to dream up derivatives and tranches de jambon or whatever would figure out some way to make the world markets more stable.

The fact that a third-rate economy and some trader with a fat finger can cause the world’s most sophisticated stock market to upchuck like a drunken high-school kid at a prom means something needs re-engineering.

I’m sorry for the Germans and the French (not really) for being stuck with weaklings like the “PIIG” nations (Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Greece), but their unremitting arrogance about the mighty Euro and our fiscal irresponsibility was getting tiresome.

The downside (and in economics, there’s always a downside), is that as the Euro tanks, investors will rush to convert their wealth to dollars. Our newly-strong currency will make it harder to export what little stuff we still make, which is not what our economy needs right now.

Too bad most Americans can’t afford to go to Europe this summer. I hear you can snap up some real bargains, especially near the Acropolis.

Morality is for losers.

It’s an artificial code of principles dreamed up by weaklings in an attempt to deny their superiors the unbridled bounty that is theirs by divine right.

Why divine? Because God obviously gave them the intelligence to dream up a system whereby they could enrich themselves through the labor of others, and then enrich themselves even further by gaming the very system they created.

At least, that’s what they believe on Wall Street.

You have to figure that outfits like Goldman Sachs have engendered some hard feelings among their colleagues on the Street, for several reasons.

First, they devised financial instruments so exotic that nobody could really understand them (including the SEC, which threw up its hands in despair and resorted to downloading pornography), sold them to unwitting customers, and then bet in competing arrangements that these same constructs would fail.

This act, by its sheer brazenness, poisoned the well for everybody. “Betting against America” is something even the clods out in flyover country can understand.

Even Wall Street’s pet poodles in Congress are distancing themselves. They’re talking regulation, which means many more millions will have to be spent on lobbyists to make sure the new laws have loopholes large enough to drive a stretch limo through.

Second, the other players are looking at the Blankfeins of the world and smacking themselves. “The man’s a genius,” they’re snarling over their single malt whiskeys. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

And this, for any self-respecting Master of the Universe, is the bitterest pill of all.

If this is what passes for regulatory oversight in the federal government, you have to wonder why Wall Street is paying so many top-dollar lobbyists to fight it.

Now it comes out that while cracks were appearing in the financial bubble's fragile walls, senior staffers at the Securities Exchange Commission were web surfing and downloading porn for as much as eight hours a day.

In one case, when his government hard drive hit capacity, a regulator began downloading his trove onto disks.

It gives a whole new meaning to "spreadsheet."

To add insult to taxpayer injury, these people get paid a lot more than most of us in the private sector could ever hope to earn, they have job security, their health care is comparable to the average European's, and they will have a nice pension to tide them over in the twilight years when they can take their smutty DVDs home and peruse them at their leisure.

Nice work if you can get it. I should have listened to my college roommate when he told me to major in economics.

Let’s face it, the image of wealthy financiers crying the blues doesn’t exactly tug on our heartstrings.

If the Republicans in Congress make an issue of preserving a laissez-faire policy toward Wall Street after what has happened to this country, they’re singing to an empty house.

The Dems know this, and they’re itching for the GOP to rise in defense of their natural constituency: the fat cats. Most Americans hate big government in the abstract, except when it’s applied to restrain the rampant greed of the plutocrats who got us into this mess.

As President Obama has said, it’s a fight he’s looking forward to having.

We may finally see the cracking of the solid Republican bloc that would rather do harm than deliver Barack Obama a victory.

After all, to a pol, self-preservation comes first and foremost. Wall Street and all its lobbying dollars aren’t worth anything to a member of Congress who can’t win the next election.