^I do know one thing, there is no strategy that I will take seriously that does not include raising taxes, particularly on the upper brackets. As one of Heinleins's benign fascist heroes used to love to proclaim "Everybody jumps, everybody fights." ^

Been a while since you've read that book. If ever. As of 2007, under Bush tax rates, the upper quintile (approx. $260,000 and above) already paid 70 percent of ALL Federal taxes, including payroll and others. If you're just talking income taxes, the number was 86 percent.

In short, that income group is already doing most of the "jumps."

^I'm tired of hearing this excuse that new jobs come from cutting taxes for the rich. We have cut taxes for the rich. Where are the jobs?^

Nobody has "cut taxes for the rich" lately. The rates remain exactly what they were eight years ago, in 2003. Go back and look at the unemployment rates of the following period. I think my "coincidence" beats yours.

We had a financial crash in 2008. It had nothing to do with tax rates, but with an overextended social engineering policy and those who exploited it.

I'm glad you're willing to look at spending cuts. So is Buck. But unfortunately, your political party is not. They went to the mattresses this month over a 1 percent reduction, which ended up being a lot less than that. There will be no useful spending cuts from the Democrats. There never have been, except from the hated military. So their answer is, as it has been for years, more taxes.

I have already explained in several different ways that there isn't enough "rich" money left in the economy to make up the deficits we have now. I showed the numbers, I applied Obama's own figures, I applied the end of the Bush tax cuts both for the rich and for everyone else. I did reductio ad absurdum. None of it made a dent, although I did earn the Buck Galaxy Puking Man for my efforts.

Obama's speech was the equivalent of the Puking Man. It showed a mind that refused to accept reality over its own long-standing delusions. There was no compromise, there was not even a recognition that the facts existed. Obama trotted out the decades-old standard leftist solutions, and discarded everything he had been told or learned. His tax increases from the speech amount to a trillion dollars over 12 years. Compare that revenue to the projected deficits and do the goddam math just once.