The phoney "deficit" problem

       I guess you all have been reading and/or watching the news about how the Demos have caved in to the Republicans in Congress over the so called debt crisis. And yet the G.O.P. still won't be satisfied until, as Grover Norquist has stated, they "shrink the government down to the size that you can drown it in a bathtub." They want to get rid of all "social" services and privatize all other services, so that we have to buy our country back from the Mega-corporations who only work by the profit motive. Oh, yes and they say those corporations shouldn't have to pay taxes either.
       Isn't anyone out there reading Paul Krugman's excellent NYT columns?(Krugman is a Nobel Prize winning Economist.) If you haven't already figured it out from the statistics, the so-called "trickle down effect" has not worked. Letting the Corporations have their tax breaks and loopholes has only encouraged them to give their CEOs fantastic bonuses. They still outsource their jobs overseas and they still spend all their surplus profits on lobbying the Republicans to break the unions. By the way, those unions are the reason we had a healthy middle-class during the 1940s, '50s, and '60s. But no more; the middle-class has been whittled down to where you can drown it in a bathtub, and those same middle-class people (Tea Party types)have been encouraged by the Republican propaganda to vote against their own economic interests.
       As Krugman has pointed out many times, the deficit is not the problem. If it were, the Republicans would be in favor of taxing the rich and ceasing all military actions that waste money, waste lives, and give American a bad rep in the international diplomatic world. But nooooo. (Refer back to Grover Norquist and his Republican agenda battle cry.)The real problem is unemployment, and neither the Demos nor the Republicans are addressing it.
       Social programs create jobs, and provide a safety net for society as a whole. When you destroy those, you basically destroy what has made America great in the first place. Milton Friedman was a jerk, and Keynes has been proven right time and time again. So much for my rant. For those of you who are not intellectually lazy here are some excellent books you could be reading.
Supercapitalism by Robert Reich
How Democratic is the American Constitution by Robert A. Dahl
The Political Mind by George Lakoff
Winner Take All Politics by Hacker and Pierson

Put your mind to work, that's what it is for.