This is not a post I wanted to write, for a number of reasons. I'll get to a few of them later. But the main reason is because I know I'm probably opening myself up to a lot of stuff I'd rather not deal with. But if there's one thing I've learned over decades as a gay activist is that it's important and empowering to come out. If you don't other people just tell your story as they see fit.

As long-time reader to Alternet, I've sighed and shook my head every time I read an article asserting that ADD/ADHD is "not real," "a myth," or a "made-up ailment" created to boost big pharma 's profits. I wondered if the writers knew anyone living with ADD/ADHD, lived with it themselves, and why I saw so few posts offering another perspective.

Then I realized that, as a sometime contributor to Alternet, I had remained silent for too long.

So, in the spirit of ADHD Awareness Week (which, of course, was last week) , I'm coming out.

According to the CDC, about 5.4 million children have been diagnosed with ADHD as of 2007. Up to 9% of school age children, and about 4.5% of the adult population have ADHD or ADD. There are millions of faces of ADHD, and I'm one of them.

Ten years ago, at the age of 33, I was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder. At the time, I was on the verge of what would be another nosedive in a life that seemed to be one long slow-dance with failure, depression, and anxiety. ; I was just a couple of weeks away from being fired from yet another job. I knew the cycle well enough that by then that I could see the writing on the wall. Try as I might, there wasn't anything I could do to stop it. And I did try.

Don't Know Much About ADHD History

One of the things I hear most often from people who don't "believe in" ADHD is that it has "only been an issue within the last decade or so." This usually follows or is followed by claims that ADHD is a conspiracy of "genocide against black boys" (I've actually heard this) a "conspiracy to make men docile" (I've heard this too), or a "big pharma conspiracy to get us all addicted to their psychiatric drugs." I wrote a post in response to all of this and more a few years ago, which included an ADHD history lesson.

Where to begin? First of all, we’re not talking about “high-energy children” that have just had too much Kool-Aid. And it hasn’t “only been an issue within the last decade or so.” Under one name or another, the characteristics known today as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder or Attention Deficit Disorder have been associated with each other, observed and recorded for over 95 years.

1902 – Dr. Still, a British doctor, documented cases involving impulsiveness. He called it “Defect of Moral Control.” He did believe, however, that this was a medical diagnosis, rather than a spiritual one.

“Deficit Moral Control.” Kinda has a nice, nearly Puritanical ring. Doesn’t it? Unfortunately, many people haven’t even gotten as far in their understanding of ADD/ADHD as Dr. Still’s 1902 assessment. Anyway, it became known as “Post-Encephalitic Behavior Disorder” around 1922, was called “brain damaged syndrome” for a while, got treated with stimulants as early as 1937, and then came Ritalin around 1956. The point is, ADD/ADHD is not a phantom condition that didn’t exist until it was invented in the 80′s.

It’s not new. In fact, it may be more than 100 years old. At least one article I found references an 1845 children’s story called “Fidgety Philip” that may be the first account of ADHD published in medical literature. (And if you ask me, “The Story of Johnny Look-in-the-Air” sounds alot like a kid with “inattentive type” ADD, such as yours truly.) And that’s just when it was documented and observed. It’s probably existed much longer. If you ask Thom Hartman, it’s actually prehistoric. Before becoming the focus of scientific study and observation, it was probably mislabeled much like schizophrenia was once believed to have its origins in demonic possession. But, alas, we live in an age where science alone doesn’t carry much weight when it comes up against what people believe.

It's been known by different names, but ADHD ; been around much longer than a few decades. It's been observed and described by scientists, authors, educators, etc., for more than160 years. But it's probably been around as long as people have been around.

The difference is that back in the time of "Fidgety Phillip" and "Johnny Look-in-the-Air," kids with ADHD were labeled as "bad kids." Kids with inattentive ADD were probably labeled as "lazy." People with ADD/ADHD were labeled as dumb, or — as the title of one book about adult ADD put it — "lazy, stupid, or crazy." They got punishment instead of treatment, and ridicule instead of help.

Weird Science

History aside, there's scientific support for the existence of ADHD as a "real" developmental disorder. Granted, the jury is still out on what causes ADHD, and it may never be narrowed down to a single cause, but there is some consensus among international scientists.

The central psychological deficits in those with ADHD have now been linked through numerous studies using various scientific methods to several specific brain regions (the frontal lobe, its connections to the basal ganglia, and their relationship to the central aspects of the cerebellum). Most neurological studies find that as a group those with ADHD have less brain electrical activity and show less reactivity to stimulation in one or more of these regions. And neuro-imaging studies of groups of those with ADHD also demonstrate relatively smaller areas of brain matter and less metabolic activity of this brain matter than is the case in control groups used in these studies.

These same psychological deficits in inhibition and attention have been found in numerous studies of identical and fraternal twins conducted across various countries (US, Great Britain, Norway, Australia, etc.) to be primarily inherited. The genetic contribution to these traits is routinely found to be among the highest for any psychiatric disorder (70–95% of trait variation in the population), nearly approaching the genetic contribution to human height. One gene has recently been reliably demonstrated to be associated with this disorder and the search for more is underway by more than 12 different scientific teams worldwide at this time.

Numerous twin studies demonstrate that family environment makes no significant separate contribution to these traits. This is not to say that the home environment, parental management abilities, stressful life events, or peer relationships are unimportant or have no influence on individuals with ADD/ADHD. They certainly do. Genetic tendencies are expressed in interaction with the environment. Also, those having ADHD often have other associated disorders and problems, some of which are clearly related to their social environments. But it is to say that the underlying psychological deficits that comprise ADHD itself are not solely or primarily the result of these environmental factors.The International Consensus Statement on ADHD quoted above was published in January 2002. Since then:

• A November 2007 National Institutes of Health study found that in children with ADHD "the brain matures in a normal pattern," but "it is delayed three years in some regions, on average, compared with youth without the disorder."
• Further research showed that stimulant medications used to treat ADHD do not effect brain size in children with ADHD.
• A September 2009 study brain scans of ADHD adults reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association linked ADHD to biological flow in processing of dopamine, which "alerts people to new information and helps them anticipate pleasure and rewards."
• In 2011 Pediatric researchers analyzing genetic influences in ADHD found alterations in specific genes "involved in important brain signaling pathways."
• Also in 2011, researchers using functional MRI " identified abnormalities in the brains of children" with ADHD that "may serve as a biomarker for the disorder." The results showed that children with ADHD "showed abnormal functional activity in several regions of the brain involved in the processing of visual attention information," and that "communication among the brain regions within this visual attention-processing pathway was disrupted in the children with ADHD."
• A new study appearing in Biological Psychiatry in August of this year found that "development of the cortical surface -- which covers the region of the brain known as the cerebral cortex -- was slower in children with ADHD." While the findings no present clinical application, they may "help point to genes that control the timing of brain development." Further research shows that these brain differences appear to persist into adulthood.

Along with biological and genetic influences, research suggests that ADHD can also be acquired -- not through too much exposure to the internet, smartphones, television, computer games, etc., but through prenatal exposure to alcohol and nicotine.

Not of this will be enough to convince ADHD denialists, especially those who might consider information from sources like the AMA and NIH to be tainted, or a least suspect. But for me, and anyone who lives with ADD/ADHD, it's at least an explanation for what goes on in our day-to-day lives and in our heads.

In My Head

Back to my story. I was diagnosed with "ADHD Inattentive Type" or "ADD, without the H." The difference between the two basically comes down to the absence of hyperactivity. Thus most people call it "ADD" as opposed to "ADHD." The proposed revision to the DSM requires six out of of nine symptoms to "have persisted for at least 6 months to a degree that is inconsistent with developmental level and that impact directly on social and academic/occupational activities."

The nine symptoms of inattention sound like what most people experience from time to time. Who doesn't have trouble sustaining attention during some activities? Who hasn't had their mind wander during a lecture or a meeting? Who doesn't lose things from time to time? Who doesn't get distracted sometimes?

The key phrases in the DSM focus on the length of time the symptoms have occurred, and the impact on "social and academic/occupational activities." I usually explain that the difference between ADD and regular forgetfulness, etc., is that the symptoms occur with enough frequency to have a detrimental effect on day-to-day life. And if symptoms are "inconsistent with developmental level," then they're occurring in a person who has no apparent reason to have such difficulties. (Thus, people with ADD endure a lifetime of hearing, "You should be able to do this." The implication being that … well, I'll get to that later.)

But I don't think any catalog of symptoms can capture what it's really feels like to have ADD. A few years ago, I saw a commercial for Strattera, a nonstimulant ADD medicine, that was close to the way I usually describe it to people:

Imagine that you're sitting in a room with no doors or windows. There are no exits. There's a television in this room with you. It's on, it's very loud, and it keeps randomly switching channels. There's no power button. You can't turn it off. There's no volume. You can't turn it down. You can't escape.

(I recently read very similar description by Jake E.S. Taylor, a teenager with ADHD, in his book ADHD and Me: What I Learned from Lighting Fires at the Dinner Table.)

Now, imagine that you can carry that room around in your head. Television is just as loud and random as before, but no one else can hear it. Imagine trying to go about your daily life of going to school or going to work, having a relationship, or just trying to carry on a conversation. Imagine trying to do that in a world mostly full of people who don't have random televisions blaring away in their heads, and can't imagine anyone else really does either. Including you. "It's all in your head," they say.

Well, yeah. That's the problem.

Medication, in my experience, doesn't shut off that television. It turns down the volume, and slows down the channel switching. It doesn't "cure" my ADD. But it does make the symptoms of ADD manageable, so that I can use the other tools I need to manage the my ADD symptoms.

Some of us manage pretty well without treatment, for a while. We compensate, not always successfully, but maybe enough to get by.

Getting By

I got by for a long time. I actually made it all the way through high school without any major problems. My grades weren't great. They were good enough to get me into local magnet school I graduated from, but not enough to get me on the honor roll. I did well in some subject. English Lit. and History were always my best subjects. Math and Science were always my worst. Always. But I could always count on my other grades to keep my GPA at least slightly above average.

That's probably one of the reasons my ADD went undetected. I wasn't obviously struggling academically. Sure, I had trouble in a couple of subjects, but I wasn't flunking out. And I did well in other subjects. It would have been hard for a teacher to tell that I was missing a lot, because I was sitting quietly and appeared to be listening intently.

What saved me was that I was always a avid reader, I learned that most of what I missed in class I could get if I just did the assigned reading. If there was a term paper, that was even better. I've always been a writer. I usually turned in well written (if not perfectly spelled papers) papers that helped my grades. But behind the scenes, disorganization and procrastination threatened to sink me. In a pattern I would repeat throughout my life, I started the school year off the same way almost every year.

At the start of every school year, I'd buy the latest, ultra-organized binder —like the "Data Center" or "Trapper Keeper" that were popular in the 80s — with a pocket for everything, and even a handy class schedule waiting to be filled in. I'd get a five-subject spiral notebook, for taking notes in class. I swore to myself "This will be the year" that I stay top of things. "This is the year I'm going to get organized and stay organized." I promised myself that I was going to keep track of my assignments, keep track of due dates, pay attention and take notes in class, etc.

It always ended the same way. My efforts at organization lasted a few months, at most, before the novelty of a new system wore off. Then I'd become overwhelmed and start forgetting to write down assignments. Maybe I'd even lose my binder. My notes would be nonexistent or indecipherable because I'd "quietly" zoned out in class, just like Deborah Moore described in an article about inattentive ADD:

Another inattentive tendency could be summarized by the adage, appearances are deceiving. Inattentive students often seem to be paying attention as they sit quietly, and, indeed, they may stare directly at the instructor for an entire class period. Yet, during this time, their thoughts have drifted from the real world around them. In such instances, their bodies remain stationary while their minds wander aimlessly through a universe of ideas and images; frequently, their academic performance reflects this lack of connection with classroom activities.

I could be sitting in class, staring right at the teacher, appearing to listen to every word. But that television in my brain kept switching channels. I would mentally "check out," without even being aware that's I was doing so. At the end of class, I realized that I'd sat there the entire time and suddenly realize that class was over and I'd everything the teacher had said. As a result, I missed a lot stuff, and struggled to catch up or just to keep my head above water.

The reason I missed stuff went back to my Inattentive ADD.

Children are naturally dreamers. It's not unusual to find them staring out a window, lost in thought about some invented escapade. Daydreaming is how they create and explore new ideas.

Snapping back to reality can be more of a problem for some children than others, though. Kids with attention problems will stare off into space in the middle of class, preferring to stay lost in their own mind rather than return to the classroom. If trouble concentrating and focusing are constant problems for your child, they could be signs of ADHD.That's another part of why my ADD went undetected. I wasn't the kid who was jumping out of his seat, running around, and disrupting the class. I was the kid quietly staring out of the window. The disruptive kid is more likely to get immediate attention, as it's obvious there's a problem . The quietly distracted kid isn't as likely to draw attention.That why those of us Moore called "Undiagnosed Dreamers" often go undiagnosed.

Ironically, the "low key" nature of inattentiveness may well have made it a more insidious force for personal disaster than the highly visible and dramatic hyperactive variation; these individuals simply attract less notice within classrooms and families. Described as "dismissed and undiagnosed dreamers" by learning disabilities specialist Paula Stanford, inattentive ADDers are usually diagnosed later in life than their hyper counterparts; in fact, many of them may never be diagnosed at all and spend their lives floundering and repeatedly failing to meet expectations.

Inattentive students don't annoy adults or behave in a volatile manner. They don't wiggle in their seats and disrupt students sitting around them. Indeed, they may even appear to maintain concentration by staring fixedly at a textbook or a lecturer for periods of time, but this apparent "focus" may mask a wandering mental state. As Stanford notes, "It's hard to see distractibility.”

People...expect to see a child in the back of the class "bouncing off the wall." This example child is always talking and can never concentrate on anything put in front of him. This child was never an example of me....I was not hyperactive; I just could not concentrate, memorize or work on something that did not interest me. (Excerpt from an essay by an inattentive ADD adult client of Brainworks.)

I recognized another part of myself in Moore's essay when I read it years ago. As much as I relied on reading outside of class and writing papers to keep my grades up, I also relied on having good relationships with teachers who would bail me out by letting me turn in assignments late from time to time.

During my elementary years, without realizing it, I learned how to manipulate my teachers into letting me turn my homework or other assignments in late...phrases like "Well, I guess, turn it in tomorrow," were frequent. Even with my ability to manipulate teachers, I still heard, "Why can't you do this? Why don't you concentrate? It's not that hard....You can't see past the end of your nose."

"Why can't you do this?" "Why don't you concentrate?" Those the constant refrain from my teachers, along with report car comments like "Terrance could do even better if he applied himself." That's when I became acquainted with one of the most dispiriting aspects of ADHD. People assume you aren't trying. You may be dancing as fast as you can, and still saying two steps behind. But nobody sees that. Maybe they don't know about ADHD. Maybe they don't "believe in it." But they assume you're just doing enough getting by.

Well, you are. You're working your ass off, and just getting by. That is, until you're not.

Hitting the Wall

Everything changed when I went off to college. I graduated from high school, thanks to my ability to compensate for what I didn't know at the time was ADD. It cost me a lot in terms of stress and near-constant anxiety, but I graduated in the summer of 1987. That fall, I set off for college.

I only went 100 miles from home, but in terms of what I was used to it was worlds away. I didn't know then that people with undiagnosed ADD/ADHD often "hit the wall" in college. I managed to get through my freshman year without seeing that wall heading straight for me. Looking back, there were signs.

By the second half of my freshman year, a major depression had set in. Depression had been a reality for me all through my school years. There were probably a number of reasons. (When you're an effeminate, non-athletic, black gay boy growing up in the South during the Reagan era, how can you not be depressed?) Having undiagnosed, untreated ADD was probably one reason for my depression.

ADHD and depression are common bedfellows. ;(Not to mention anxiety.) Children with ADD/ADHD are at greater risk for depression. Depression is also more prevalent among adults with ADD/ADHD.

It's not that ADHD causes depression, but it contributes to depression by its very nature. Someone with undiagnosed and untreated ADD/ADHD (especially into adulthood) has probably experienced a long series of failures: in school, work, and relationships, etc. The result is a sense of failure and low-self worth that grows feeds into depression with every fresh failure. Even when things are going relatively well, familiarity with failure causes feelings of anxiety, because you know it's all going to fall apart again. You never know when or how, but you know it will. It always does.

My freshman year of college was the first time I was diagnosed with depression; or mis-diagnosed. I say mis-diagnosed, because the anti-depressants I was prescribed helped somewhat with my moods, but did little to alleviate the symptoms of untreated ADD that were contributing to the depression. Over the years, I changed dosages, and changed medicines, but little else changed. I felt better for a while, but by then, I was already on my way to hitting the wall.

I did hit the wall at the beginning of my sophomore year. I had reached the limit of my compensatory abilities. Plus, the drinking that started in my freshman year had begun to morph into full fledged alcoholism. In retrospect, drinking was probably a way of "self-medicating"; not so much to treat my ADD symptoms, but to forget the

The combination of all of the above, plus the death of a close friend that fall, was too much. I became so depressed that it would take me hours to get out of bed in the morning. I started missing classes. When I did go to class, I realized that I was in over my head in some of them (like Biology and Algebra), and stopped going. I flunked out of every that first quarter.

Lost Time

After a lot of tears and explanations, my parents agreed not to yank me back home to finish college. (After 18 years of growing up in the closet, I wasn't about to go back to it, which is what moving home would have amounted to.) But they had a condition for letting me go back: I would not take a full load of classes. Instead, I would take a partial load — two classes per quarter, instead of three. That was the beginning of what I would come to call my "lost time."

"Lost time," Benjamin Franklin once said, "is never found again." My sophomore year was the beginning my "lost time." Though it took me a while to notice, I was inevitably falling behind my peers. In few years, I looked around and the people I'd started out with were graduating and moving on to graduate school, or starting careers. I was still trying to finish my bachelors degree. Those same peers would finish grad school, graduate from law school, or further advance in their careers while I continued trying to finish my B.A. After seven years, I finished.

Seven years. Three years longer than it was "supposed to take," made even longer by a couple of failed attempts to pass Algebra during the summer.

I don't think I could have put into words the sense of relief I felt, or the sense of loss that it was mingled with. The relief was that I finally finished. My mom and brother came to my graduation, and watched me don my cap and gown for the ceremony. The loss I felt at the time was because I could look around me and see how much time lost. The friends and peers I'd expected to graduate with in the beginning had long since moved forward in their lives and careers. I felt how much time I'd lost, and I had a strong desire to finally "get started," and start catching up.

I didn't know about the Ben Franklin quote then. In fact, I only came across it a few months ago. At the time, I had hope that lost time could be found again, or at least made-up for somehow. Almost twenty years later, my experience bears witness to the truth of Franklin's quote.

Granted, those years were not a total loss. I got sober during my last year of college, and have stayed that way for 20 years. That's something. That I managed to stay sober through all that would pass after graduation is the main reason I lived long enough to get my diagnosis.

It's what I had to live through that gets to me. I'll tell more of that story, and how diagnosis and treatment changed things for me, in the next post.

In a post about Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's bid to strip public employee unions of collective bargaining — the most important and effective tool for protecting workers — Van Jones wrote:

If a foreign power conspired to inflict this much damage on America's first responders and essential infrastructure, we would see it as an act of war.

It is an act of war, a now all-but-openly-declared war — and not just against unions, but against American workers and against the middle class. Americans are accustomed to denying even the existence of classes, let alone class conflict. This week America's ongoing class war arrived on our doorstep with the subtlety of a daisy cutter — in the form of Walker's union-busting politics, and the massive protests in Madison and beyond. Now that the battle is joined, the big questions are what the outcome will be, and whether Democrats will take the opportunity to tell American workers unequivocally whose side they are on. What we are seeing in Wisconsin is job killing in action, with the goal of eliminating or permanently weakening the middle class. Conservative policies were responsible for the death of American manufacturing and the loss of "good jobs" — jobs with decent wages and benefits that aided the growth of the middle class from the working class.

The Center for Economic and Policy Research defines a "good job" as one with health insurance, a pension plan and earnings of at least $17 per hour. That works out to about $34,000 a year, the inflation-adjusted median income for men in 1979, when U.S. manufacturing jobs numbered 19.6 million, an all-time high. Since then, however, the economy has lost nearly 6 million manufacturing jobs — 52,000 in February alone. Among them were many of the 3.5 million "good jobs" lost from 2000 to 2006, according to John Schmitt, a senior economist at CEPR. As those jobs disappeared, many blue-collar workers were forced to take jobs with far less pay and benefit security. ...Helping fuel the loss of good jobs has been a decline in union membership, industry deregulation, increased outsourcing of state and government services and economic policies that focus more on containing inflation than on maintaining full employment, Schmitt said. (Emphasis mine.)

What Conservatives Really Want Now conservatives have turned their eliminating  what may be the last "good jobs" left in America, in terms of benefits. It's not just public employees and public employee unions conservatives have in their sights, but the very concepts of a common good and a public interest. George Lakoff explained in "What Conservatives Want," a post dedicated to the protesters in Wisconsin (emphasis mine):

Conservatives really want to change the basis of American life, to make America run according to the conservative moral worldview in all areas of life. …The way to understand the conservative moral system is to consider a strict father family. The father is The Decider, the ultimate moral authority in the family. His authority must not be challenged. His job is to protect the family, to support the family (by winning competitions in the marketplace), and to teach his kids right from wrong by disciplining them physically when they do wrong. The use of force is necessary and required. Only then will children develop the internal discipline to become moral beings. And only with such discipline will they be able to prosper. And what of people who are not prosperous? They don't have discipline, and without discipline they cannot be moral, so they deserve their poverty. The good people are hence the prosperous people. Helping others takes away their discipline, and hence makes them both unable to prosper on their own and function morally. The market itself is seen in this way. The slogan, "Let the market decide" assumes the market itself is The Decider. The market is seen as both natural (since it is assumed that people naturally seek their self-interest) and moral (if everyone seeks their own profit, the profit of all will be maximized by the invisible hand). As the ultimate moral authority, there should be no power higher than the market that might go against market values. Thus the government can spend money to protect the market and promote market values, but should not rule over it either through (1) regulation, (2) taxation, (3) unions and worker rights, (4) environmental protection or food safety laws, and (5) tort cases. Moreover, government should not do public service. The market has service industries for that. Thus, it would be wrong for the government to provide health care, education, public broadcasting, public parks and so on. The very idea of these things is at odds with the conservative moral system. No one should be paying for anyone else. It is individual responsibility in all arenas. Taxation is thus seen as taking money away from those who have earned it and giving it to people who don't deserve it. Taxation cannot be seen as providing the necessities of life for a civilized society, and, as necessary, for business to prosper.

The public workers targeted in Wisconsin and others are the same people who make middle-class life and security in America possible. They are the people who ensure our safety, who safeguard our health, and facilitate us getting where we want to go, among other things. They are the police who responded within minutes after our house alarm was set off by a strong wind that blew open a door that lacked a deadbolt lock; the teachers and school staff that helped our son when he needed it; the paramedics who responded quickly when a neighbor's child had trouble breathing; the firefighters who responded when a neighbor detected a gas leak; the bus driver that gets our son to school safely each day; the public transportation workers who get me to work and back home safely each day. The list goes on and on. When abstract budget cuts translate into fewer teachers, police officers, health workers, firefighters, etc. in our communities, we begin to realize that such cuts hurt rather than heal. The very necessities that support the existence of a middle class are threatened. They will not be replaced if conservatives are successful in eliminating them. They will not be affordable if privatized. The reason that there are public services supported by public workers is that there are things we believe need doing and should be done even if they're not profitable. Where there is not enough of a profit margin for private industry to see a benefit, and too great a need for charitable entities to meet entirely, it becomes a question of the public interest, requiring a public solution. We are faced with a conservative movement that not only doesn't believe in a public good but sees it at the biggest of our problems. Ideology vs. Reality: Something Has To Give Wisconsin and other states are where the irresistible force of ideology meets the immovable object of reality. While many Americans support the idea of "tough" budget cuts, most Americans want the painful cuts made somewhere else — someplace where they won't feel it. Like the Johnny Mercer lyric that says, "something's gotta give." It will either be the will of the people or the ideological move to increase economic pain and inequality. As America looked on with the rest of the world at the amazing, dictator-toppling protests in Egypt, we heard reports of how Egypt's economic inequality catalyzed a citizens' movement. And we learned that economic inequality is worse here than in Egypt. It's no coincidence that even conservatives see the parallels between Cairo and Madison. The connection between the uprisings in Cairo and Madison aren't lost on the participants in both. Facilitated by the internet, protesters in Cairo and Madison have exchanged statements of solidarity. Technology may have partly bridged that gap, but what brings the uprisings in Egypt and elsewhere closer to home is not so much the technology as the understanding that passes along it, through barriers of culture, language, religion, etc. What does it mean when Americans in Madison, Wis., see themselves in the same boat at protesters in Egypt? It means that our domestic economic policies have mirrored our economically driven foreign policy, with consequences as devastating to working and middle-class Americans as those our decades-long support of Mubarak's regime was to Egyptians. A New York Times article recently stated, "Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt has long functioned as a state where wealth bought political power and political power bought great wealth." The same can be accurately said of the U.S. in the past 30 years. In Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer--and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson explain what's happened in the last 30 years.

That shift occurred in the 1970s because businesses and the super-rich began a process of political organization in the early 1970s that enabled them to pool their wealth and contacts to achieve dominant political influence (described in Chapter 5). To take one of the many statistics they provide, the number of companies with registered lobbyists in Washington grew from 175 in 1971 to nearly 2,500 in 1982 (p. 118). Money pouring into lobbying firms, political campaigns, and ideological think tanks created the organizational muscle that gave the Republicans a formidable institutional advantage by the 1980s. The Democrats have only reduced that advantage in the past two decades by becoming more like Republicans–more business-friendly, more anti-tax, and more dependent on money from the super-rich. And that dependency has severely limited both their ability and their desire to fight back on behalf of the middle class (let alone the poor), which has few defenders in Washington.

Americans are fast approaching a crossroads where the abstract budget cuts run headlong into reality of the pain those cuts will inflict on our families and communities. And in the communities where Americans live and work, the abstract notion of budget cuts translates into real economic pain. It translates into states taking action to increase economic pain while at the same time undercutting their ability to relieve the worst of it. A Lost Middle Class, Unbridled Corporate Power The war against public employees is also a war on the many things government does that support the middle class. That Republicans have not offered alternatives to these supports either reflect their lack of concern about the American middle class, or their confidence that the private sector will eventually supply alternative supports. Either way, we're probably facing a "lost decade" in which middle and working-class Americans suffer the loss of these supports, facing stagnation at best and downward mobility at worst. For younger generations, this will come a crucial time developmentally, during which they would otherwise acquire or inherit advantages they could then pass on to their children, thus perpetuating the  middle class. This is an attack on the middle class, both directly and indirectly; even on those of us who have fallen for the right's "politics of envy" and thus focus our ire on public employees rather than at those further up the economic ladder who are, still, feeling no pain in this recession. Instead too many of us look at public employee unions and ask "Hey, why should they have it so good?," instead of asking "Hey, how come we don't have it that good?" (Perhaps because only 6.9% of private employees are unionized now, due in no small part to Republican efforts to aid corporate union-busting.) As Kevin Drum notes, killing off unions removes the only remaining counterbalance to corporate power.

... Of course unions have pathologies. Every big human institution does. And anyone who thinks they're on the wrong side of an issue should fight it out with them. But unions are also the only large-scale movement left in America that persistently acts as a countervailing power against corporate power. They're the only large-scale movement left that persistently acts in the economic interests of the middle class. So sure: go ahead and fight the teachers unions on charter schools. Go ahead and insist that public sector unions in Wisconsin need to take pay and benefit cuts if that's what you believe. Go ahead and rail against Davis-Bacon. It's a free country. But the decline of unions over the past few decades has left corporations and the rich with essentially no powerful opposition. No matter what doubts you might have about unions and their role in the economy, never forget that destroying them destroys the only real organized check on the power of the business community in America. If the last 30 years haven't made that clear, I don't know what will.

Perhaps now more Americans know how high the stakes really are. Recent polls show that 65% of Wisconsin residents and 61% of Americans support the right of public employee unions to bargain collectively. (In Wisconsin, Walker is losing the support even among Republican senators.) This attack on the middle class comes at a time when the middle class has already been weakened by the economic impact of conservative policies and politics. Wisconsin illustrates that conservative economic and fiscal policies create crises that Republicans then exploit to accomplish political ends -- weakening their opponents and rewarding their cronies along the way. Naked cronyism is employed in pursuit of what to conservatives is a higher goal: to "finish the job" of remaking our economy (to more closely resemble those of other countries also facing citizen revolts) through destroying regulation, consumer protection, collective bargaining, labor organizing, and thus ensuring continued growth of economic inequality. Mother Jones magazine spelled it out in just eight charts. The importance of this end, the permanent diminishing of the middle class, to Republicans is evident in how far they are willing to go and how unswerving they are in the face of public opposition and the cognitive dissonance of reality. So, the debt or the deficit is not the point in the first place—because the deficit is merely the symptom, not the disease. The disease is the conservative economics that have created the crisis. The crisis they have created is the point. Give conservatives this: They never let a crisis go to waste, in the way the Obama administration have done thus far. Indeed, in his short time in office Walker has destroyed (and threatened to destroy more) jobs than his policies are likely to create, if previous applications of conservative policy are any indication. The $117 billion in tax breaks that Walker and the Republican legislature pushed through for GOP cronies basically created the very crisis he claims to address. That Walker refuses any compromise at all, even though the unions agreed to accept wage and benefit reductions as long as they keep the right to collective bargaining, shows that the budget isn't the point. Power is. That Walker doesn't have time to talk to the state's Senate Democrats, but does have time to take a call he thinks is from one of the Koch brothers, shows exactly whose side he's on. If Walker accepts compromise, then unions survive to bargain another day. Meaning that the wage and benefit reductions are not guaranteed permanent. If Wisconsin's economy improves, the states public employee unions would be a position to bargain for a return to previous wage and benefit levels, based on the argument that their sacrifice should end with the state's budget crisis ends. The Crossroads, In Washington And Beyond We are approaching a crossroads. It happens that this time it's been reached in Wisconsin, and other states are approaching the same point. At some point, it becomes impossible to camouflage the blatant cronyism, inequality, and bald-faced contradictions in what conservatives promise and what their policies actually deliver. At that crossroads, things can go at least a couple of ways. Either people resist, because they are still inspired by the possibility of change and believe in their ability to affect change with great effort, or they are successfully crushed by economic pain and effectively disenfranchised the point that not only do they no longer believe in the possibility of change, but they no longer bother with an effort because they believe "The government does what it wants to do. We can do nothing." "The people united," goes the chant, "will never be defeated." The fate of that union, and the ability of united people to change the direction of government, is being decided in Madison, Wisconsin, today. And maybe in your state capitol tomorrow. We will soon face a stalemate in the federal government similar to that in Wisconsin. Since congressional Democrats won't have the option of flight, they had better be ready to fight, and to make the case that Republicans have refused to bargain at all, let alone bargain in good faith. Democrats must make the case that they are working to prevent Republicans in Congress from doing to the rest of the country what Gov. Walker and Republican legislators are trying to do in Wisconsin and other states now. What's happening in Wisconsin and across the country may be the beginning of Americans realizing the consequences of voting in Republicans whose policies don't reflect what Americans really want. It may be the beginning of the Republicans running smack into the reality that the midterm elections did not give them a mandate or confer a public stamp of approval on their agenda. We can only hope it is the beginning of Americans turning back that agenda when it comes to their hometowns. A popular business tip advises would-be business leaders to "Find a parade and get in front of it." The question is whether Democrats, having failed to start a parade after 2008 will have the sense to jump in front of the one that started in Wisconsin and, at long last, lead it. Democrats' first step towards real leadership, from the president on down, should star with an unequivocal statement of support for public employees and public employee unions in Wisconsin and other states, support for the right to organize and bargain collectively, and ultimately support for the progressive values that are the foundation of all the above. The conservative war against the working people, the middle class, and fundamental American values has burst out into the open. It's time now for the president and Democrats to speak up and stand up; to leave no doubt whose side they're on, by publicly joining the fight.

Here's another reason to vote in the mid-term elections this November: Conservatives think you need a pay cut. As I've said once or twice before, conservatives' bottom line message is simple: America has economic problems because too many people have had it good for too long; and when they're worse off again, the nation and its economy will be better off. The people they think had it too good for too long are you and me, and almost anyone who punches a clock to pull a paycheck.

Of course, right now they're focused on people who earn minimum wage; Republican candidates like Alaska senate hopeful Joe Miller and West VA Senate wannabe John Raese want to abolish the minimum wage because they say it's unconstitutional, while Connecticut Senate candidate Linda McMahon can't make up her mind.

Never mind that the constitutional arguments are apparently due to conservatives constitutional inability to comprehend the constitution. Never mind that it seems they want to turn back time to 1787 when the constitution was ratified, or 1792 when the Bill of Rights was ratified. Never mind that, according to their logic they should shut down their campaigns, because even though the Constitution establishes Congress as a legislative body, it doesn't give congress anything to do since it can't do anything that the constitution doesn't literally include. That is, it has to literally "say" the words — like "minimum wage" — or we're limited to only those solutions and ideas that existed in 1987.

Never mind that two thirds of Americans support raising the minimum wage, which hasn't kept pace with inflation for years.

Never mind the obvious insanity of all that. Their economic reasons for wanting to abolish minimum wage don't add up either. Both Miller and Raese claim that abolishing minimum wage will create jobs, presumably because businesses will be spurred to hire more workers because they can pay them (even) less. Reality is actually quite the opposite.

And that's where the rest of us come in. First, they're coming for the paychecks of minimum wage orders. But yours and mine are next.

Even if we earn less than the minimum wage — like servers in the food industry, for example — conservatives like Minnesota candidate for governor Tom Emmer want to make sure we earn less, by even abolishing tips.

Seriously.

Even if we earn far more than minimum wage, conservatives believe you and I earn way more than we should. They rarely say so, but everyone in a while of them tests the water by saying thins like what Bloomberg columnist Kevin Hassett did recently: "Your fat paycheck is keeping your neighbor unemployed."

Seriously.

So here comes the leap into ice-cold water: The biggest problem with the labor market right now is that wages are too high. As Washington again turns to government spending as a cure for unemployment, some against-the-grain thinking is in order.

Economics teaches that full employment would be reached if wages adjust downward, to a level that better reflects current circumstances. At lower wages, employers would desire more workers. Labor markets generate persistent unemployment only if wages are sticky, failing to fall as demand declines.

A number of reasons help explain why wages don’t and won’t drop, beginning with federal and state minimum-wage laws.

Never mind that millions of Americans have already had their wages reduced though unpaid furloughs and reduced working hours.

Meanwhile, wage growth among people who have jobs has just about stopped. The Economic Policy Institute reports that between 2006 and 2008, wages grew at an annualized rate of 4.0%; by contrast, over the past three months annual wage growth has plummeted to just 0.7%. At the same time, furloughs -- requiring workers to take unpaid vacations -- are on the rise: recent surveys show 17% of companies imposing them. More than 20% of companies have suspended their contributions to 401(k)s and similar pension plans.

So why isn't the media screaming? Partly because these job and wage losses are not, for the most part, falling on the segment of our population most visible to the media. They're falling overwhelmingly on the middle class and the poor. Unemployment among those who have been in the top 10 percent of earnings is closer to 5 percent, and their earnings continue to climb -- although, to be sure, much more slowly than before the meltdown.

Never mind that wages for working Americans have stagnated for decades while the wealthiest Americans saw their income skyrocket.

Many of those who are lucky enough to still have work have seen their hours and benefits cut back, or have been forced to take unpaid furloughs. Twenty percent of companies have suspended their contributions to 401(k) plans or other pensions.

And wages are stagnant, and have been for some time.

Going all the way back to 2000, wages have grown less than 1 percent a year, adjusted for inflation, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

Meantime, the richest Americans have seen their wealth skyrocket, so much so that now we have widest gap between the rich and the poor since 1929.

Never mind that companies long ago figured out they can increase productivity without hiring, by increasing productivity without increasing wages — provided that workers are desperate enough to kept their job and they paychecks no matter how little they make in comparison to how hard they work.

The median hourly wage for American workers has declined 2 percent since 2003, after factoring in inflation. The drop has been especially notable, economists say, because productivity — the amount that an average worker produces in an hour and the basic wellspring of a nation's living standards — has risen steadily over the same period.

As a result, wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of the nation's gross domestic product since the government began recording the data in 1947, while corporate profits have climbed to their highest share since the 1960's. UBS, the investment bank, recently described the current period as "the golden era of profitability."

Never mind that corporations have found that layoffs can even pay for executive bonuses.

Corporate America. CEOs in one company after another are throwing workers onto the unemployment rolls and dodging taxes to boost short-term profits and fatten their own paychecks. They are shifting the burden of a poor economy onto the public purse -- while continuing to line their own pockets.

According to a new report by the Institute for Policy Studies, CEOs from the 50 firms that have laid off 3,000 or more workers since the onset of the crisis took home nearly $12 million on average in 2009. That’s 42 percent more than the average for CEOs of S&P 500 firms as a whole.

On this side of the looking glass, what the rest of us call "reality," corporations and businesses are sitting on tons of capital — some $1.8 trillion in cash, at present.

But anyone looking closely at the American economy today would see this is nonsense. American corporations have an unprecedented $1.8 trillion of cash. The Fed, meanwhile, has slashed interest rates to essentially zero – a record low – and is still holding over $2 trillion in securities that it said last week it will keep from shrinking. And a Federal Reserve survey released earlier this week showed that banks have been making it easier for businesses of all sizes to get loans. Credit standards for small firms have been loosened for the first time since late 2006.

In other words, businesses have all the capital they need. They’re sitting on it or can borrow it more cheaply than ever. But they aren’t using it to create jobs.

Why not? Because there’s not enough demand for their products or services. Consumers aren’t buying.

They're using it to their give executives bonuses instead of investing in their businesses or hiring more workers.

Corporate executives, in reality, are not suffering at all. Their pay, to be sure, dipped on average in 2009 from 2008 levels, just as their pay in 2008, the first Great Recession year, dipped somewhat from 2007. But executive pay overall remains far above inflation-adjusted levels of years past. In fact, after adjusting for inflation, CEO pay in 2009 more than doubled the CEO pay average for the decade of the 1990s, more than quadrupled the CEO pay average for the 1980s, and ran approximately eight times the CEO average for all the decades of the mid-20th century.

American workers, by contrast, are taking home less in real weekly wages than they took home in the 1970s. Back in those years, precious few top executives made over 30 times what their workers made. In 2009, we calculate in the 17th annual Executive Excess, CEOs of major U.S. corporations averaged 263 times the average compensation of American workers. CEOs are clearly not hurting.

It's clear enough that wage cuts don't help boost unemployment, because lack of capital isn't what's keeping corporations from hiring. In fact, wage cuts will likely make them even less likely to hire, if workers are desperate to hold on to their jobs at any cost, in the midst of record-high unemployment.

Companies don't hire because they have extra money lying around. They hire because demand for their products and services rise, and they need more workers to meet that demand with an adequate supply. Wage cuts, for those making minimum wage and above, will only serve to further reduce demand, because it takes money out of the pockets of people who are more likely to spend it.

Conservatives, on the other hand, want to put more money in the hands of people who probably won't spend it.

Give the wealthiest Americans a tax cut and history suggests they will save the money rather than spend it.

Tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 under President George W. Bush were followed by increases in the saving rate among the rich, according to data from Moody’s Analytics Inc. When taxes were raised under Bill Clinton, the saving rate fell.

...When tax legislation was signed by Clinton in 1993 -- raising the top tax rate to 39.6 percent from 31 percent -- the saving rate fell from 12.1 percent in the second quarter to 9.5 percent in the first quarter of 1994. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index rose 1.9 percent from July through September, after little change the previous three months.

When the first Bush tax cuts were signed into law in June 2001, pushing the top rate down to 35 percent, the wealthy boosted savings. The saving rate climbed to 2.8 percent in the first quarter of 2002 from minus 2 percent in the second quarter of 2001. The increased savings coincided with a 1.1 percent decline in the S&P 500 index.

Maybe that's why they fought so hard to protect bonuses and compensation for Wall Street banksters. They will likely fight as hard to reduce your paycheck and mine as they did to protect Wall Street's excesses.

It's not hard to figure out why.

It's not just that conservatives are opposed to minimum wage. It's like with Social Security. It's not that conservatives are opposed to Social Security, the program. They are, of course. It's that their really opposed to the idea of social security (with a small "s") for any American who work for a living and make less and a few $100K a year, at least. What they're in favor of is social security only for those whose bank statements prove they deserve it.

It's not that conservatives are opposed to a minimum wage. They are, of course. What they're in favor of minimal wages for everyone. Or almost everyone, anyway.

Conservatives in Congress just fired 240,000 American workers. Conservatives in Congress just killed 240,000 jobs. Conservatives in Congress just essentially added 240,000 more Americans to the ranks of the unemployed. However you frame it, people who want to work and have been working are soon to be out of work, thanks to GOP Senators members who refused to reauthorize — even for three months — a stimulus program so successful it won praise from Republicans like Mississippi governor Haley Barbour.

Steve Benen explains.

At issue is the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) Emergency Fund, which should have been one of the most popular programs in Congress. A key component of the Recovery Act, the fund subsidizes jobs with private companies, nonprofits, and government agencies, and has single handedly put more than 240,000 unemployed people back to work in 32 states and the District of Columbia.

Governors, including Mississippi's Haley Barbour (R), have sung its praises, and urged its extension. In July, CNN called the TANF Emergency Fund "a stimulus program even a Republican can love."

Except, Republicans didn't love it. Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) led the floor fight this week, and was even willing to accept a compromise: instead of a year-long extension that Democrats had requested, Durbin sought a three-month extension, at a cost of just $500 million, in order to keep the fund alive through the end of the year. Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) refused to allow it.

"The majority has known this program was going to expire at the end of this month all year and has taken no steps to reauthorize this important social safety net program," said Enzi, who blocked Durbin's request for "unanimous consent" for a reauthorization.

Of course, GOP Senator Judd Gregg (N,H.) killed a Democratic effort at reauthorization in March of this year. Just last week, GOP Senator Orrin Hatch shot down Democratic Senator Max Baucus's attempt to reauthorize the program as part of a "tax extenders bill." And the House approved a bill reauthorizing TANF back in May.

They have been trying to kill this program for just as long as the Democrats in Congress have been trying to extend it.

Conservatives chosen to increase the unemployment rolls, increase the welfare rolls, and increase the number of families in poverty on what basis? Based on what principle?

What do conservatives have against a program that put 240,000 people to work in the middle of an unemployment crisis? What do they have against the 240,000 people who wanted to work and were working until conservative obstruction killed their jobs?

I heard one of those 240,000 speak back in May, when congressional conservatives were already targeting TANF for elimination. His name was Charles Jenkins.

"I am a father," Charles Jenkins, 55, says by way of introducing himself, "and I have worked all of my adult life; more than 30 years. I am here testifying today because I need a job."

Employed by a as a driver for a transportation company, Jenkins was hospitalized in 2009 due to serious illness. Like too many American workers, Jenkins had no sick leave to fall back on, was was terminated. He began receiving unemployment benefits and food stamps.

Unemployed for nearly a year, Jenkins has applied for "10 to 12 jobs a week" without success. He has begun working as a community organizer in training at the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, through the Targeted Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) Emergency Contingency Fund subsidized employment program. That will end on September 30, and Jenkins will join the unemployed African-American men in Chicago and the more than 1.4 million unemployed African-American men across the country.

What do conservatives in Congress have against Charles Jenkins? What do they have against a man who has worked all of his life, and wants to work?

Jobs Forum Testimonies May25

What do they have against a program that, by putting 240,000 people to work, created more jobs than a Republican White House and Congress created in eight years? When the "score" is 240,000 to zero, their solution is to erase the scoreboard.

What do conservatives have against the roughly 400 people in Perry County, TN who were found jobs thanks to TANF.

In rural Perry County, Tenn., the program helped pay for roughly 400 new jobs in the public and private sectors. But in a county of 7,600 people, those jobs had a big impact: they reduced Perry County's unemployment rate to less than 14 percent this August, from the Depression-like levels of more than 25 percent that it hit last year after its biggest employer, an auto parts factory, moved to Mexico.

If the stimulus program ends on schedule next week, Perry County officials said, an estimated 300 people there will lose their jobs — the equivalent of another factory closing.

What do conservatives have against people like Perry County resident Brian Davis?

"It's very scary, because there's just no work," said Brian Davis, a 36-year-old father of four, who got a stimulus-subsidized job with the City of Lobelville after he lost his job of 17 years at an auto parts plant that shed hundreds of jobs. Now he faces the prospect of unemployment again.

"This was a huge help," Mr. Davis said. "The way the economy's been and the way people are struggling, you're worried about putting food on the table for your children and keeping the electricity on."

The money that pays Mr. Davis's salary, and the salaries of tens of thousands of other people around the country, will dry up after next Thursday, when the welfare program in the stimulus act that pays the bills for those jobs is set to expire. While the Obama administration and Democrats in Congress want to extend the program, they are meeting stiff resistance from Republicans, many of whom oppose all things stimulus.

What do conservatives have against people like Jaquayla Burton, who will lose her first job at the insistence of Republicans in Congress?

Jaquayla Burton's job will end this week unless the Senate does an about-face and decides to preserve a welfare-to-work program that created more than 240,000 jobs as part of the stimulus bill.

"I wish they would because on Friday I'll have to sign up for unemployment. I don't feel good about that," said Burton, 20, in an interview with HuffPost. "It's hard because I have two kids to take care of. I've been working here nine months and it's kind of stable at home, and then on Friday I'll be unemployed."

Burton is one of six moms doing community outreach work for for the San Francisco Living Wage Coalition whose subsidized jobs will disappear on Sept. 30, said campaign co-director Karl Kramer. "We do community outreach to educate people about what their rights are under San Francisco's wage and benefit laws."

...Burton said her job as a community organizer with the San Francisco Living Wage Coalition, which she's held for the past nine months, is the first she's ever had. [Campaign co-director Karl]Kramer said Burton and the five other moms at his nonprofit earn $11.03 per hour and work 32 hours a week. They will all be let go come Friday.

What do conservatives have against people in states like Alabama, South Carolina, North Dakota, and Tennessee (among others), who received help and got jobs where neither was available before?

Examples of the TANF Emergency Fund at work include:

• South Carolina is using the program to provide jobs to parents who would otherwise be receiving cash assistance through the state's regular TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) program.
• Illinois has placed more than 20,000 individuals in jobs, far exceeding its original goal of 12,000 placements.
• Alabama is using the program to provide jobs to TANF recipients statewide, but has found it especially helpful in rural communities where very few job opportunities exist.
• North Dakota is providing jobs for unemployed non-custodial parents who don't have the financial resources to meet their child support
• A rural community in Tennessee created 400 new jobs and helped reduce the county's unemployment rate from 27.3 to 18.6 percent over an eight-month period.

What do conservatives have against people like the eight moms and two dads employed by Diana Spatz's organization?

"They're telling the moms once the fund ends, you're going to have to work for free," Diana Spatz told HuffPost Friday in an interview. Spatz is the executive director of Lifetime, a California membership organization that helps low-income parents pursuing post-secondary education that employs eight moms and two dads thanks to the program. "They can work through the end of this month and then I think we're going to be able to keep two or three of them, but we aren't sure," she said.

What do they have against Debbie Verdale, one of the parents TANF helped Spatz's organization employ?

Debbie Velarde is one of more than 100,000 people who will lose their jobs by September unless Congress extends a stimulus bill provision that gives states funding to create jobs programs for low-income parents and young adults.

"I'll have to pay for everything and I don't have the means to do that," said Velarde, who earns $8 an hour through the program as an administrative assistant at Lifetime, a California membership organization that helps low-income parents pursuing post-secondary education. "They need to leave this program open a little longer."

These people are, or were, working when they would otherwise be on welfare. What's more they are, or were, learning skills that will make them more employable and more attractive to employers.

At a time when nearly 44 million Americans live in poverty, conservatives in Congress are choosing to increase those numbers by phasing out a stimulus program that — as part of the whole stimulus — helped keep six Americans out of poverty. The recent poverty numbers didn't include the people who benefited from TANF, and other stimulus programs.

With some 14.9 million Americans unemployed, conservatives have seen fit to add more Americans to the ranks of the jobless.

Most likely, many of them will join those ranks too, unless Sharron Angle reveals where the jobs she says are out there happen to be located. But, then again, that's not in her job description (assuming she gets the job she seeks). It isn't in any conservative's job description to help Americans suffering in this economy. At least not those who makes less than $250,000 a year.

Conservatives would rather fight to keep bailed-out banksters rolling in bonuses than keep 240,000 Americans working who were unemployed before. They would rather kill a program that created more jobs than a Republican White House and Congress managed in eight years.

They would rather cut a program like TANF that's doing what the private-sector is not doing — at a profit, mind you — than spend $500 million to fund just through the end of the year. That's less than 1% of the $2.3 trillion cost of the tax cuts for the wealthy conservatives do want to extend.

(And a Merry Christmas, by the way, to those who had jobs through TANF, but will face the holidays without them now. Scrooge would be proud. TANF's demise starts a round of layoffs that will extend to the holidays. State and local governments are making efforts to replace the funding they will be losing, but state a local governments are already strapped, and have been for some time, making it impossible for them to sustain those efforts for long if at all.)

They would rather cling to policies that don't create jobs or growth, and have the "smallest bang for the buck," of any other options. Like John Boehner's "two step" job creation plan, that amounts to a long walk off a short economic pier by turning the clock back to the Bush era, with 10-year-old policies that didn't do work the way conservatives said they would.

They would rather give tax cuts the wealthy, who will toss it in the vault with the rest of their money.

Tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 under President George W. Bush were followed by increases in the saving rate among the rich, according to data from Moody's Analytics Inc. When taxes were raised under Bill Clinton, the saving rate fell.

...When tax legislation was signed by Clinton in 1993 -- raising the top tax rate to 39.6 percent from 31 percent -- the saving rate fell from 12.1 percent in the second quarter to 9.5 percent in the first quarter of 1994. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index rose 1.9 percent from July through September, after little change the previous three months.

When the first Bush tax cuts were signed into law in June 2001, pushing the top rate down to 35 percent, the wealthy boosted savings. The saving rate climbed to 2.8 percent in the first quarter of 2002 from minus 2 percent in the second quarter of 2001. The increased savings coincided with a 1.1 percent decline in the S&P 500 index.

They prefer the above to helping middle and working class Americans who will spend, thus putting money back into the economy where it can be spent to support jobs and spur growth by increasing demand.

I'm Keri Fulton and I'm here with Chad Stone, the Center's Chief Economist, to discuss the jobs report for June.

...

2. What's needed to create jobs at this rate?

Stronger demand for goods and services. An effective jobs bill will move these numbers in the right direction. Unfortunately, hopes are fading fast for Congress to enact effective jobs measures. Too many lawmakers seem to think that their immediate priority should be the budget deficit rather than the jobs deficit.

...

4. How does the absence of a jobs bill hurt the recovery?

Unemployed workers won't have as much money to spend and will cut back their purchases. States will have to raise taxes, lay off workers, cancel contracts and scale back programs even MORE than they otherwise would. Reduced spending by unemployed workers, newly laid-off state employees, and state contractors who lose business will be a significant drag on the recovery and will impede job growth.

They would rather kill a program that even some conservatives have praised as a one that could continue to be an effective and efficient job creator, eventually even creating most of those jobs in the private sector. Not only have they killed the program, they're killing the jobs it would have created. — perhaps most of them in the private sector, which is the kind of market-led job creation that conservatives say they want. Now, instead, demand for what the private sector offers will drop by at least 240,000.

Given the state of the labor market, it is hard to imagine how any sensible person could oppose such a move. It is a shame that such common sense was absent last year. If they are to be more than the party of no, Republicans need to rally around the Democrats who have shown such reserved pragmatism.

No sensible person would do this given the state of the economy, if they had the state of the economy in mind. Every effort to spur job creation and relieve the suffering of the unemployed has been blocked by the same conservatives who shed crocodile tears over the likelihood that people like Ben Stein, and wealthy whiners like him, will have their taxes raised about as much as the cost of a bag of groceries, without so much as a thought for the working Americans who will be devastated by this callous obstruction.

Maybe conservatives in Congress believe that TANF was helping the "wrong people". Maybe conservatives believe the work those helped by TANF were doing — helping low-income parents pursuing post-secondary education, educating people about their rights under wage and benefit laws helping economically challenged communities organize and advocate for themselves — doesn't need doing and mustn't be done because it helps the "wrong people."

What's clear is what conservatives think should be done to help thousands of Americans like Charles Jenkins, Brian Davis, Jaquayla Burton, Debbie Verdale

Nothing.

In an interview today with "Fox News Sunday," Alaska GOP Senate nominee Joe Miller had trouble explaining how he would help the 43.6 million Americans in poverty, even as host Chris Wallace repeatedly pressed him for more than conservative talking points.

Wallace asked Miller about his assertion in August on CBS's "Face the Nation" that unemployment benefits are unconstitutional, noting that without them, many more Americans would be in poverty. "What would you do for them?" asked Wallace.

Miller, however, struggled to come up with an answer, and instead shifted to talking points about reducing the size of the federal government. Wallace repeatedly pressed him on the issue, without ever receiving an actual response.

Because the unspeakable answer is "nothing." That's what they've offered as an alternative to a successful program like TANF. Nothing. That is, except the same disastrous policies that got us here because didn't work before or worked too well.

TANF wasn't enough in terms of what could have been done to address the jobs crisis, but its success showed what was possible. Short-lived as it was, and small as it was, it put more people to work that conservatives did when they had a virtual lock on government. (Which, by the way, they spent not only not-creating jobs, but not reforming health care, and not even talking about financial reform.)

TANF may rise again, depending on the outcome in November, but the damage will have already been done to 240,000 Americans and their families, whom conservatives in Congress kicked back on to the unemployment rolls.

However disappointed and frustrated some progressives are that not enough has been done on jobs (and I count myself in that number), let's not kid ourselves. If conservatives take over after November, not only will nothing more be done, but they will roll back all that has been done if they get half a chance.

Killing 240,000 jobs was just the opening act. Wait until they cut unemployment benefits to the same 240,000 Americans they just sent to the unemployment, and then some.