Near the top of the list is the balanced budget constitutional amendment, a durable fake pulled out of mothballs by Republicans and Democrats alike in the hope of proving their determination to assert spending control. State legislatures pass resolutions favoring the amendment, Congressmen and Senators issue press releases demanding its passage, knowing that the thing will never quite materialize and that if it did, the consequences would be awful.

The amendment's latest versions, like all that have come before, are shot through with loopholes and air pockets--such as the exception for periods when the country is at war, as we have been for nearly the past decade.

Then there is the House Republican plan to slash domestic discretionary spending and then freeze it for the next ten years at the same level as 2006, which sounds reasonable until you realize that would require reductions of more than 40 per cent in essential government services like border security, federal law enforcement, food safety, education and environmental protection.

For politicians who are more or less on the payroll of the coal industry or the meat packing cartel, that doesn't necessarily sound so bad. As long as nobody is dying from E coli poisoning in the Capitol Hill cafeterias, maybe they believe we can afford to lay off half of our agricultural inspectors for the next ten years. Meanwhile the rest of us belong to the special interest group that breathes the air, drinks the water, and wonders what hellish bugs lurk in that package of hamburger.  

Variations on these ruinous themes currently abound in Washington, where nearly every elected official is eager to prove that he or she is a single-minded accountant with the same mindless mindset as the Tea Party. So Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) has joined with Senator Bob Corker (R-TN) to propose that annual federal spending be limited to no more than one-fifth of the gross domestic product. That sounds reasonable, too, until you realize that the nation's aging population and rising medical and pension costs will inevitably require us to spend more, not less, to keep the elderly out of poverty.

No doubt there are sensible cuts to be made in federal spending, starting with the bloated defense sector that the Republicans continue to hold sacrosanct (presumably because it is such a rich source of legal and illegal graft). The curve of health care spending must be bent downward, too.

But if we honestly wish to bring the federal budget closer to balance, without wrecking vital services or plunging the nation back into recession, why not consult the record of the one president in recent memory who actually achieved that goal? Not Ronald Reagan, the affable wingnut whose tax cuts blew open a huge deficit, but Bill Clinton--who left balanced budgets and a nation on track to paying off the national debt entirely.

How did he do it? Clinton isn't shy about explaining what happened on his watch.  The budget deals he made with the Congressional Republicans were significant, but not nearly as significant as the tax increase on the wealthy that he passed, without a single Republican vote, in his first budget in 1993.

Voting to raise taxes on the rich was the crucial step toward fiscal responsibility and a long period of high employment, national prosperity and international prestige. There is no other way to stabilize the budget without inflicting grave damage on our future.  

Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for his years of stewardship of the International Atomic Energy Agency, he is suddenly the target of insults and attacks from Republicans who deem themselves expert on the politics of the Middle East. Former UN ambassador John Bolton calls Mr. El-Baradei a "dilettante" and former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer goes further, calling him "a bad guy."

The opinions of these veterans of the Bush White House, perhaps the least successful government in American history since the Hoover years, are not worth much--except as a reminder of the continuing ill wind blowing from that defunct administration and its policies. Their hostility to Mr. El-Baradei and to the mass civic movement in Egypt reveals the hollowness and uselessness of the neoconservative worldview at a moment of intense crisis for American diplomacy.

To everyone else, it is obvious that Hosni Mubarak can not abide much longer as president of Egypt, despite the billions in aid that we have lavished on him these past three decades. And to everyone else, it is also obvious that whenever he goes, the most promising alternative is Mr. El-Baradei, a secular liberal with strong ties to the West.

But to the neoconservatives, the possibility that Mr. El-Baradei might help preserve his country's 80 million souls from bloody chaos matters much less than the fact that he disagreed with them about the invasion of Iraq and that he still disagrees with them about a pre-emptive  strike against Iran. He committed the unforgiveable sin of being right when they were wrong about Iraq's mythical nuclear weapons program, and he has insisted on pursuing a peaceful resolution of Iran's atomic ambitions as well. 

With their peculiar belief that what we always need is more armed conflict in the Mideast, the neoconservatives despise Mr. El-Baradei--although Americans would have saved thousands of lives and trillions of dollars if only we had listened to his truth rather than their lies.

Among those lies, of course, was the notion that "regime change" in Baghdad would spark a democratic renaissance across the Mideast beneficial to America and Israel as well as the people of the region. That didn't happen, but today a burgeoning movement of youth demanding democracy and human rights has appeared--and the neoconservatives now warn us to fear and reject them.

Let us hope that the Obama administration is sufficiently sensible to ignore such awful advice. Balancing our national security interests against the complexities of places like Egypt and Jordan, with strong Islamic political movements, will be difficult to say the least. But there is no point in nostalgia for the friendly dictators of the past and the arrangements we once made with them. Hysteria over the presence of the Muslim Brotherhood should be assuaged by the example of Turkey, where the ruling Islamist party is seeking even now to restore ties with Israel and join the European Union.

Neglect, arrogance and cynicism have left us with little knowledge and few relationships that will be useful as we cope with momentous changes in the Mideast. If we face that fact, then the last thing we should do is undermine those, like Mr. El Baradei, who might help us negotiate this challenging course.   

The meaning of that narrative could scarcely have been clearer. Mr. Obama articulated a vision of the nation's future shaped by an idealistic view of our past, in which government encourages growth, opportunity, and the pursuit of happiness by an inventive and industrious people. If that isn't the whole history of America, it is certainly an appealing theme--and one that contrasts powerfully with the partisan negativity and apocalyptic pessimism voiced by the Republicans.

Gently but persuasively, the president suggested that the electoral turn toward the Republicans last November was a mistake, and began to explain why.

The problems that we confront as a developed nation in an era of new and rising powers, he said, extend well beyond deficits and debt. While those fiscal issues certainly pose a real threat to our future prosperity, so do the deficits in our educational system, our physical infrastructure, our scientific research and our broadband capacity. If we focus solely on the fiscal deficit--and insist on reducing it by mindless, ruinous budgetary policies--then America will be set firmly on the path of national decline.

Therefore, said Mr. Obama, we must find ways to finance the essential investments that will equip Americans to participate successfully in the global economy, from high-speed rail to renewable energy to decently compensated teachers. Much of his plea for modernization fell on deaf ears among the Republican Congressional majority, of course, whose leading intellects don't necessarily accept the scientific consensus on climate change and nurture grudging doubts about evolution.

The president cannot expect the Republicans to move his agenda forward during the next two years, but he can start to demonstrate why their own agenda is empty and stagnant. In that task he was amply assisted by the (two!) sourly partisan and negative rejoinders to his speech from the other side. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), the Tea Party diva, repeated the same stale talking points that always issue from her mouth when she isn't inventing fables about our history. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the new House budget chairman, failed again to indicate how his party will restore fiscal balance--let alone how they mean to address the central questions of education, science, technology, and infrastructure.

With grace and openness, Mr. Obama invited the Republicans to engage those issues, as well as the more immediate debates over health care, taxes and the budget. He reminded them and the public that Democrats stand for fiscal equity. He urged the nation's millionaires to give up their obscene tax breaks and set forth a deal to close loopholes and lower rates if every corporation pays its share of taxes. He explicitly rejected cutbacks that would fall most heavily on the most vulnerable and offered a spending freeze far less destructive than that proposed by the Republicans.

If the true state of the Union is more perilous than Mr. Obama dared to admit, he certainly began to describe the real challenges before us--and by implication, the obstacles that can only be removed at the next election.

Data sets and out-year projections may make everybody's eyes glaze over, but without accurate information the end result of legislation is disaster. Today there is no way to avoid fiscal ruin and social erosion unless we can determine whether health care reform will tame or swell deficits.

Yet the Republican leaders in Congress are now insisting on their own "facts" concerning health care and deficits, which directly contradict the careful studies of the Congressional Budget Office. They have gone so far as to denigrate CBO, among the most respected agencies in Washington since its founding in 1974, by accusing its analysts of using "rigged" assumptions to reach its conclusions.

Why? The agency's conclusions are irritating to the Republicans, especially Speaker John Boehner and Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan, because the CBO found that health care reform will reduce the federal deficit by more than $230 billion during the first decade after it goes into effect--and then by trillions of dollars in the decades that follow.

For many Americans worried by the growing deficit, that particular aspect of health care reform was no doubt obscured by all the faked uproar over "death panels."

Now, however, with the question of deficit reduction hanging over the new Congress, the Republicans feel obliged to address the fiscal impact of their drive to repeal, defund, and destroy health care reform. They've chosen to do so by issuing their own 19-page rebuttal of the CBO analysis, filled with accusations about budgetary "gimmicks," "double-counting" of revenue, and omission of major costs--and the use of "biased" assumptions imposed on the agency's analysts by the Democrats who were in control when the bill passed.

But the truth is that Mr. Boehner has been around long enough to understand that the CBO's methods are strictly neutral and indeed bipartisan. As Paul N. Van de Water of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted, in a detailed rebuttal of the attack on CBO, the agency's reality-based analytical procedures were developed during the past three decades by House and Senate Budget committee members and staff, as well as administration officials of both parties.

For the current crop of politicians to disparage them is an insult to those honest efforts and an assault on the foundations of government.

If all that seems too dry, too wonkish, too earnest, then consider this: The present Speaker and his cronies know that their partisan attack on the CBO is patently hypocritical. Unless afflicted with early Alzheimer's, they can surely remember that two years ago, the Republicans and other opponents of reform were crowing  loudly because the CBO had found that the Senate Finance Committee's health care bill would increase the deficit. Although Democrats grumbled, they accepted the CBO findings and rewrote the bill extensively to ensure that it reduced the deficit, as promised.

Consistency and integrity are important, not only as basic values but because without them, we have no hope of achieving any public objective.  Politicians who knowingly seek to promote fraudulent numbers and budgetary smoke cannot be trusted with our medicine or our money.

editorial@observer.com

That doesn't mean trying to determine whether events like the Tucson massacre result from violent political rhetoric--a debate that swiftly and predictably devolved into a self-pity party for Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh and all of their imitators. Both instantly demonstrated what a lawyer friend calls "consciousness of guilt": Ms. Palin with a preposterous claim that the crosshairs on her SarahPAC map marking the Giffords district was a surveyor's symbol, and Mr. Limbaugh with his even more ludicrous assertion that the Democratic Party is supporting the assassin. Their overwrought reaction, narcissistic and nonsensical, proves that those who profit from bullying blather cannot be expected to suddenly turn civil, even in the aftermath of tragedy.

Besides, there was plenty of evidence that the barrage of hate speech is potentially deadly long before Tucson. Last summer a West Coast man loaded up his car with weapons and explosives, setting out to kill executives of the liberal Tides Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union because, according to his mother, he had listened to Glenn Beck excoriating those groups as "socialists" destroying America. Not long before that episode, yet another lone gunman shot three Pittsburgh police officers because he had heard on Fox News that his guns were going to be confiscated by the government.

Were the right-wing babblers on radio and television directly responsible for these incidents? No. They are merely responsible for fostering a toxic environment that encourages crazy people to act on their most dangerous impulses. Politicians who talk about their "armed and dangerous supporters" and turning to "Second Amendment solutions" are equally culpable--and equally unlikely to admit any responsibility or change their obnoxious tone.

But if there is little hope of restraint and civility, then perhaps we ought to reconsider how to prevent sick people from obtaining the means to act on their violent impulses. We easily identify individuals such as Loughner as insane, but how sane are the rest of us if we continue to enable their crimes? In Arizona and many other states, madmen with a desire to kill face no obstacle in obtaining automatic weapons that they can conceal and carry. If they have the money they can buy these sophisticated firearms--along with clips that let them fire up to 33 rounds in a matter of seconds.

In every eulogy to the Tucson victims, in columns, commentaries and speeches from all points of the political spectrum, we hear that these atrocious murders are too much to bear. We hear that the threat of gunfire at public gatherings is a threat to American democracy, and cannot be tolerated. And at the same time, we hear that there is no political support for stricter controls on guns and ammunition, even to keep them out of the hands of Loughner and his ilk.

That contradiction practically defines America's social madness--because even as we weep for the little girl and the distinguished judge and all the other victims, we know that this same bloody scene will be replayed somewhere in this country, and soon. The first sign of national mental health would be for Congress to enact Rep. Carolyn McCarthy's bill to outlaw high-capacity ammunition clips. If that seems unlikely, then remember this: its opponents will be more culpable than any talk jock or cheap demagogue when the next mass killing occurs.

jconason [at] observer.com

The Congressional Republican leaders, like their counterparts on the Democratic side and in the White House, all understand that the debt limit must be increased -- just as they understood the imperative of the bank bailouts two years ago. But that won't stop them from indulging in reckless rhetoric -- or from seeking to take advantage of the situation in ways that could result in dangerous consequences, as they vow to hold the debt ceiling hostage to enormous budget cuts. These veteran leaders appear to have learned nothing since the debacle of 1995, when then-Speaker Newt Gingrich told the bond industry that he would allow the country to default on its debt unless President Clinton agreed to his plans to slash Medicare and other federal programs. "I don't care what the price is," he declared.

That was a very different time -- and the price of default would be far higher today, in a world where nations and states on the verge of insolvency continuously threaten to scuttle global recovery. Back in the Nineties, the Clinton Administration was able to outwit Gingrich both politically and fiscally, using tactics that preserved the full faith and credit of the Treasury without capitulating to Republican demands. Clinton forced the Republicans to fulfill their bluff. Now the numbers are bigger, the space to maneuver is smaller, the potential downside is incalculable -- and the nihilistic ignorance of the Tea Party faction is the dominant attitude within the GOP.

Even the merest prospect of default would be gravely damaging to American prestige and prosperity, continuing the apparent Republican project of hastening our national decline that began with the invasion of Iraq under false pretenses (and the refusal to pay for that multi-trillion-dollar disaster). So it is understandable that the Obama administration would want to find some way to lure the Republicans and their fanatical minions back from taking us all over the cliff.

What the Republicans have hinted they must have in order to release the debt hostage is a package of budget cuts amounting to at least $100 billion this year -- or a rollback of spending on discretionary programs (excepting veterans, defense and homeland security) to 2008 levels -- and perhaps a deal to destroy Social Security and Medicare as well. They have carefully refused to offer specific cuts that might anger their own constituencies.

No doubt the Obama White House, which too often prefers "bipartisanship" to principled confrontation, will be tempted to make such a deal. The problem is that cutting the budget so drastically will undo the stimulative effects of the December tax-and-spending agreement -- and plunge the economy back into recession. The President loses either way.

Perhaps the time has come for the Democrats to adopt a different strategy. Let the Republicans govern, or misgovern. Don't rescue them from their own recklessness. Don't vote to raise the debt ceiling unless and until the Republican leadership supports the bill -- and if they refuse, let them take the responsibility for the consequences. Let's see how long they can listen to the screaming of their major contributors on Wall Street as the world economy shudders. Make the hostage takers surrender this time. 

Unfortunately for those heroes, they are no longer so fashionable in right-wing circles and neither is their hometown. Even as they suffer from the cancers and pulmonary illnesses that have beset them as a result of their service, they are seem to be scorned among conservatives in Congress as just another "special interest" seeking a new "entitlement."

If only the first responders had asked for help back when they were still useful as political props! (And not merely as partisan hostages to help preserve the Bush tax cuts for the GOP's wealthiest patrons.)

The James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, named for a police officer who died from a respiratory disease in 2006, has been in the works for several years - which means that Republican leaders have had many, many opportunities to improve what ought to have been a bipartisan measure from the beginning. Instead, they dishonestly complained about the bill suddenly appearing in the last hours of the lame-duck session. Actually there have been hours of hearings on how best to provide care and funding, and the Democratic sponsors have made every effort to ensure that this legislation is carefully crafted, both fiscally and programmatically. It is capped at less than $7 billion, will sunset in a decade, and sets forth strict guidelines for providing benefits.

So what is the real Republican objection to the Zadroga bill? That isn't clear, because almost none of the GOP Senators who unanimously blocked a vote on the bill has had the courage to explain his or her position on the Senate floor or on television. Their propensity for posturing on the deficit is one possibility; another is their poisonous attitude toward unionized public servants, a category that includes police and firefighters as well as teachers and postal workers. Or perhaps they dislike the bill's financing via closure of a corporate tax loophole, which has provoked howls of protest from the Chamber of Commerce.

Conservative politicians still remain quick to exploit raw emotion over 9/11 when the opportunity presents itself, as in the debate over the Islamic community center proposed for a site in lower Manhattan. The hallowed Ground Zero is sacred to every American, according to the blowhards who indulged in those cheap anti-Muslim rants - but the suffering and dying who hurried there in the hours of danger must now fend for themselves.

Certain Republicans bear considerable responsibility for ensuring the passage of this legislation, and very few of them have stepped up. Rudolph Giuliani spoke out briefly in favor of the bill, but "Mayor 9/11" ought to have lobbied his party's Senators far more vigorously - in person if necessary. What about George W. Bush, whose best-selling presidential memoir dwells at length on his own jut-jawed version of his role in 9/11 history?

To abandon those whom we so rightly venerated is to bring permanent dishonor on the entire nation. Why would the Republicans want to stain themselves with this indelible disgrace?

Bullying Republican Senate leaders into a "voluntary" ban on earmarks may represent a political triumph for the Tea Party movement, but as a measure to reduce the federal deficit it is a meaningless substitute for real action. The facts about earmarks--and the deficit, for that matter--are so simple that even the dumbest birther should be able to understand.

Funds directed to specific projects by legislators--which is what earmarks are--account for around one percent of any annual budget, so they represent far too little money to substantially reduce the budget. Besides, banning earmarks won't reduce the budget (or the deficit) anyway, because they are drawn from funds that have already been appropriated. 

So much for that sideshow, a cynical exercise whose only conceivable purpose is to deceive voters. How would serious people try to reduce the deficit? First, it is essential to understand how and why the deficit grew in the first place.

It isn't the stimulus, stupid. And it isn't the bailouts, either.

Compared with the actual causes of the long-term deficit, neither the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act nor the Troubled Asset Relief Program amounts to much--even though they were successfully demonized by the same people who make noise about earmarks. Most of the TARP expenditures will be recovered eventually. And according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, whose analysis is broadly respected as nonpartisan and accurate, all of the stimulus spending will account for slightly more than $1 trillion between 2009 and 2019, including debt service.

Now a trillion dollars sounds like a lot of money, even over a decade, and it is--except when measured against the far greater costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the tax cuts enacted during the Bush administration.

As many commentators noted at the time, no president before George W. Bush had embarked on a major war-- let alone two wars--without raising revenue to pay the costs. The CBPP estimate of the combined cost of the Iraq and Afghan conflicts and the Bush tax cuts adds nearly $7 trillion to the federal deficits between 2009 and 2019, or roughly six to seven times the amount attributed to the stimulus.

Still paying attention?  The other underlying causes of the long-term deficit are the lingering costs imposed by the recession, which will continue to eat away at the federal budget for a decade to come, and the rising national bill for health care as the population ages.

No, stupid, that doesn't mean the deficit is caused by health care reform or "Obamacare"--although that has been demonized too.  In fact, the president's attempt to reform America's broken, ridiculously inflated system of delivering medical care is likely to reduce health care costs significantly, but that is only a beginning.

Proposals to reduce the deficit by impoverishing seniors, punishing middle-class families and neglecting infrastructure and education will do more harm than good. The deepest problem in the US economy is the gross tilt of income and wealth toward the very top and the distortion of policy to favor financial manipulation rather than real growth.

Perhaps it is time to listen again to the only president in recent memory who balanced four budgets and left a surplus for the Republicans to squander. He achieved those goals not by cutting spending, shutting down the government or ending welfare, but raising taxes on the wealthy in his first budget. There will be no progress toward fiscal balance and economic sanity until we acknowledge those facts--and stop listening to stupid.

When their party won the first Bush midterm in 2002, Karl Rove crowed that his political team had made history, which was true enough - and
then went on to claim a partisan realignment that would put Republicans in charge for decades if not centuries. They lost control of Congress and the White House within the following six years, not least because of false assumptions about the meaning of their victories.

If the leaders of the new Republican majority believe that 2010 represents a sweeping ideological shift - rather than an expression of fury and fear over the nation's stagnant economy - -they risk overreaching again.  That risk increases for them under enormous pressure to pander to the extreme elements of the Tea Party movement.

Consider the Republican promise to repeal health care reform, a position that might appear highly popular to anyone who hasn't read much polling data on the issue. Election Day exit polls showed that the health care bill is not nearly so widely despised as right-wing propaganda suggests - and that its demise is certainly not the highest priority of voters.

Asked whether they want the health care reform bill repealed in the next Congress, 48 percent said yes and 47 percent said no - a statistical tie that belies any claims of overwhelming opposition. Asked whether health care was the most important issue in the midterm election, only 19 percent agreed, compared with 62 percent who cited the economy.

Keep in mind that the midterm electorate was heavily weighted toward the conservative, older white voters most hostile to President Obama and "Obamacare," as it is known on Fox News. Those same exit polls showed a drop in younger voters from 18 percent in 2008 to only 11 percent this year, and a rise in elderly voters from 16 percent in 2008 to 23 percent this year - a stunning shift. That helped conservatives to increase their share from 34 percent to 41 percent.

Of even greater importance is the fact that so many Americans - including many independent voters who say they want repeal - currently have little or no idea what the health care reform bill actually provides. Thanks to Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and Fox News, millions still think the bill will force doctors to pull the plug on Grandma. In a recent survey, up to 40 percent of respondents in a recent survey said they believe the bill creates the mythical "death panels" conjured by Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich in a "government takeover" of the system.

None of that is true, of course - and many of the bill's little known but real provisions will attract support as people learn about them in a debate over repeal. Most people like the idea of regulating insurance companies to make sure they spend money on care rather than profits and promotion; most people like the idea of protecting consumers from exclusion for pre-existing conditions; and most people appreciate the idea of letting parents insure their children until age 26.

But come January, the Republicans will be obliged to file repeal legislation - and to argue that the public will fare better under the tender care of the insurance oligopoly than with any government protections at all. Otherwise the Tea Party will wreak havoc in the 2012 primaries, or so they warn.

There was no overwhelming mandate in this election on health care. Certainly here was no mandate to turn the country over to the insurance companies or any other corporate elite. The Republicans assume otherwise at their own peril.

The fleeting thrill of ousting a particular elected official (or even dozens of them) ultimately will not bring much comfort to anyone inspired by more than mere partisan fury. The Tea Party movement and its followers claim that they were originally motivated by the failure of Republicans and Democrats alike to balance the budget, improve the economy, and reduce taxes and government waste. But their energies were diverted toward the restoration of Republican power. And the goals of the Republican leadership are entirely oriented toward a partisan victory in 2012, as they have declared more than once during the election season.

What that means in practice is no progress on the budget, the economy, taxation or the size and scope of government. As nostrums go, the Tea Party's evident enthusiasm for throwing teachers, police officers, firefighters and other public employees out of work makes very little sense in a depressed economy.

Similarly, the insistence of some voters (and the politicians who pander to them) that taxes must be cut while restoring fiscal balance is mathematically impossible -- unless we are prepared to contemplate massive cuts in Medicare, defense spending, homeland security, environmental protection, infrastructure maintenance and a host of other essential functions. What would the angry voters say about national security when a spending reduction of 25 percent encourages a new round of terrorist attacks?

Most likely, they would complain furiously, never noticing the consequences of their own behavior.

Polls have showed again and again this year that many voters know little or nothing about the actual content of the health care reform, banking reform and stimulus legislation that have aroused so much opposition. Most voters have no idea that the hated "bailouts" -- whose passage was among the few truly bipartisan initiatives in recent years -- were not only successful but almost free of cost to the taxpayers. And most seem unable to conceive of the disaster we would be facing now, as a nation, if Barack Obama and George W. Bush had let the financial and insurance sectors collapse along with the auto industry.

Whatever rearrangement of power on Capitol Hill results from the midterm, the surest outcome is that there will be no change in the trends that supposedly irritate the Tea Party. Even if the Republicans fulfill all the promises they have recklessly offered to their own right wing, those trends are likely to continue and even worsen. There will be no significant reduction in the deficit or the debt. There will be no substantial reform of the tax system. And there will be no safeguard against future bailouts and corporate abuse - especially if the Republicans fulfill their promises.

Even if the Republicans could somehow force through their dream budgets, the outcome would only be more of the same: enormous tax breaks for the very highest earners, likely tax increases for everyone else at either the federal or local levels or both, and higher deficits for decades into the future as revenues fall. And if they somehow repeal the banking reform legislation that passed this year,  that may well ensure the repetition of the same bailouts that inspired the rise of the Tea Party.

The voters have told us that they're mad as hell and won't take it anymore. But their madness has ironically guaranteed that they will get more of exactly what they profess to despise.