Its been fascinating to watch the talking points coalesce into a re-run of the Carter era rhetoric about the economy, taxes and the deficit.

John Podesta, former Clinton White House chief of staff and president of the liberal Center for American Progress, says lawmakers need to raise more tax revenue as part of the solution to fund "investments" for the future.

Ultimately, analysts say, solving the debt problem will likely require both tax hikes and spending cuts, along with broader structural reforms of the way government operates.

Scare the country with deficits to create the political environment for tax increases--"to fund [government] investments for the future."

The Democrat economic agenda seeps through like a leaking pen in a shirt pocket--we need to make sacrifices to make the Democrat's big government utopia a reality.

For anyone with any sophistication about economic matters, this is clearly a suicide spiral--the more money confiscated by the government to build the Democrats unassailable voter base of unionized government workers, the less investment is possible in the private sector, the less tax revenues that get generated from a shrinking economy and falling productivity, the more taxes have to go up (to avoid the moral hazard of saddling future generations with the debt...), the smaller the private sector gets, the poorer we all become. Before you know it, we're France and you're living in an HLM* collecting subsistence-level payments from a Democrat-run government that you'll have to vote for or face the real prospect of starvation.

Permanent political majority indeed.

Unfortunately for the Democrats, this has even less of a chance of working now than it did in the 1970s. Informed, reliable and most importantly--independent economic analysis is available from countless media sources on the internet and cable. We have decades of global economic history to clearly demonstrate one simple and irrefutable fact--governments do not create jobs (or even 'save' them), people create jobs. People creating small businesses, developing new markets, producing new efficiencies and putting capital to work.

Quite simply, the historical secret of U.S. economic dominance over the past century is not our GDP, but the fact that its economy has generated around 50% of the world's profits fairly consistently. Before any left-wing bobos point their fingers and sputter j'accuse!, let me point out that profits are overwhelmingly generated by new business--entrepreneurial endeavors. Corporate bean counters who engineer profits by layoffs and cost-cutting are not much different that Democrat law makers who think that increasing the number of government employees actually helps the economy--its all short-term thinking; in the first case to qualify for a yearly bonus (future of the company be damned...), and in the second case for short term political advantage (country be damned...).

There is nothing inherent evil about 'investments' or 'deficits', but the objective definition of an investment is money applied to an endeavor with the expectation of a positive return--the term simply doesn't apply to patronage jobs in the federal or state governments which for any objective perspective, can only be seen as 'overhead'.

History has taught us that the best investment we can make is in our human capital--the bright boys and girls with the energy, genius and drive to create something new in the world. As the Obama administration is demonstrating for us right at this moment--those kids don't go into academia.

You can quibble about tax cuts all you like, but the reality is that they don't try to pick winners and they do expand the economy and by extension, tax revenues.

The Democrats in Congress and the White House are right--politics is broken--and they broke it by putting their own selfish party interests ahead of the obvious solution to the country's woes.

*25% of the French population lives in these concrete bunkers modeled after Soviet-style housing projects...