PS. Future historians will ridicule us for the asinine term “The Great Recession.” What a sick joke.

But we should be able to agree that anyone who is willing to work is not a different (and inferior) person if they don’t have a lot of money. And they’re not a different and inferior person if they seek help when they can’t make ends meet.

Somebody has to flip burgers and fry potatoes or we can’t go to McDonalds and such work is not a purgatorial punishment for any lack of ambition. It’s just work. If it doesn’t get done we don’t get hot, fast burgers.

With that in mind we can look at what I also know is a real problem, but it has two ends. One of which is the restraint of entitlement costs and the other is expansion of the GDP. The conservative point of view is that spending cuts are the cure for both ills.

They aren’t. One of the most interesting things about the job drop in 2010 is what jobs were lost. There was virtually no change in the growth of private sector jobs. All the job losses were government jobs, mostly at the State level. Those jobs are a permanent loss until revenues increase and the continued slowdown of consumer demand resulting directly from those RIF’s is a millstone around the neck of all other growth that might bring in more revenue.

This is simply a downward spiral doing nothing for either the economy as a whole or for the debt problem.

The “fiscal cliff” is the perfect test case for whether spending cuts will both generate GDP and renewed revenues and will reduce the deficit. I don’t believe it will. I think that it will induce a federal RIF of overwhelming proportions as well as crunching in the high tech defense industry, generating a downward spiral of the revenues needed to make any serious dent in the deficit.

And maybe cause another Great Depression.

I’m pretty sure I know the misery it will cause, but if that finally puts the stake through the heart of this “no new taxes, cut all spending, enter the New Jerusalem” fantasy, it will be, just barely, worth doing despite the massive increase in misery this country will see.

But I insist that the “cut everything but my pet spending”, whether it is the Pentagon or Health and Human Services has simply got to cease.

Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

It is undeniably true that the GOP desperately needs to communicate better that it does comprehend & care about the poor among us. The party does an absolutely terrible job at that. It doesn’t help that the MSM is so openly hostile to the very idea, and the “compassionate conservative” moniker is a huge strike against much of it, but they do have to do better.

To put the matter bluntly, the food you put on the table and the consumer goods that make your life comfortable are financially subsidized by the fact that people are paid so little for their work that they actually must seek assistance to live, even though they are able, willing, and actually do work.

Do you seriously think that the price of your hamburgers at McDonalds, or even the presence of a McDonalds at all, wouldn’t change if everyone was so “prosperous” and “independent” that nobody needed to take a job flipping burgers or French frying potatoes?

This is your “underclass” and all I can say is that you are very lucky to have them under you.

And you talk of “dependence”? What you call “prosperity” is a chance to become one of the “subsidized” for the goods you buy at any big box store, rather than being one of the subsidizers working there who actually make the physical details of your “prosperity” possible and affordable.

Up here in my part of Ohio, you cannot be on Medicaid if you have liquid assets of more than $1500, which you have to prove with a current bank statement. And your assistance is cut by a “spend down” which you must pay directly to the state or submit medical bills which you have acquired to be prorated against any and all assets under $1500.

Checked the balance of your bank account lately?

To receive an individual maximum of $186 a month in food assistance you have to submit every financial document you have to the scrutiny of the State of Ohio–wages, rent, utilities, and bank statements or other asset documentation. The poor have no personal privacy whatever.

And how much a month do you spend on groceries?

“Sorry, no private trust in the Cayman Islands, or defacto money laundering in the Netherlands for you. You’re part of the dependent underclass.”

The cardinal sin of the Conservative point of view on this matter is not one of either omission or commission, but one of non-acknowledgement. It is a failure to recognize that before there can be either “dependence” or “independence” there is “interdependence” and you are just as interdependent with those who work for less than you do as they are with you.

Or, as the old song says, “The very thing that makes you rich, makes me poor.”

We’re all Americans and we all have the fantasy of being Daniel Boone, pioneering in the wilderness, free, “independent”, hard working, family raising, growing corn for moonshine (Yes, that’s what they did with it in those days to be able to market it.) and living “off the grid” in current colloquial terms.

But you know what made that possible for Daniel and all his cohorts back then? Free federal land. Free. If Daniel paid a dime for any of the land he farmed or any of the trees he cut to build a home and keep his family warm, I don’t know of it. Do you?

Daniel was just as “dependent” on, and interdependent with, Virginia planters like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, as well as canny businessmen like Ben Franklin, brewers like Samuel Adams, lawyers like John Adams, and artisan silversmiths like Paul Revere. As well as on the new government they created and the excise taxes it collected.

Every last generation of Americans up to a little more than one hundred years ago was dependent, directly or indirectly, on the same sort of Federal land or service subsidy as the starting point for their “prosperity” and their “independence”–subsidy of everything from government exploratory surveys; outrageously large grants of land to railroads to insure that the founders of a new town had to buy the land (unlike old Daniel) from the railroad company; favorable government beef contracts to ranchers near any Cavalry Fort, and the network of Cavalry Forts and cavalry troops themselves; “land grant” colleges (such as OSU) to provide agricultural information to farmers, and even the Pony Express and the Post Office.

Interdependence, and not an underclass of parasites in any way, shape, or form. Not then. Not now.

As you say, the Democrat Party is STILL making promises that they have absolutely no chance of paying out. From their perspective, why not do so? It’s worked out incredibly well for them in California and other blue states where they have absolute control. And now it’s working nationally. Not for long.

We were not picky about signatures, except for one woman whose original in the book was nothing like what she signed. I let her try again and it was close enough. A name change — the full name — at the address, but the new name not in the poll roster, that I called in to the BOE and was told to allow a provisional ballot.

I am saying that we cannot expect that people will not vote their self-interest. Though I do agree with Pseudoplotinus that society is complex and the 47% is not an invariable voting bloc. Our family, we, I, have been desperately poor at a couple of pints in our lives, though never on public assistance. We had help from people in our church and from family. Many endure poverty and find ways out and into prosperity. Call it the American way and it is an argument I have with that last book of Charles Murray’s. But his point was that there are people who are not even looking for ways out of poverty and off public assistance, which is why we have an underclass.

Brian, the gravy train for those folks is not over, not while politicians are not responsible about addressing the debt that an entitlement class puts us in. Maybe there will be a miracle and Democrats will decide to do something about the entitlement mess and debt, but no one running on that side said anything about it. They talk about cutting defense, but the whole defense budget is not enough money to offload the debt and let’s talk about a defenseless America for a little bit.