The road to economic recovery must run through major new infrastructure upgrades, innovation and development. The American infrastructure was once the envy of the world, a valiant testament to the ingenuity and collaborative muscle of a free people; now, it is crumbling [pdf] from malignant neglect, and the cynicism of our political system’s dealings with money.

Infrastructure spending was once part of the central mission of building a great nation, open to trade and competition, where free people would migrate, ship, travel and explore, according to their own free will, imagination, and opportunity. Now, that embarrassment of riches is little more than embarrassment, and the resulting confusion over how we let such a vibrant landscape slide so far.

The so-called “Ryan budget plan” —as recently as last year considered a radical, fringe proposal, even by top Republicans, but in 2011 approved by the Republican House majority as their official legislative plan for the nation’s fiscal policy— calls for eliminating Medicare and replacing it with a system of vouchers to lower the cost of buying private insurance.

The plan has already stirred a nationwide revolt in public opinion against the new Republican majority, and turned one Congressional district, not lost by the party in over a century, decidedly Democratic, despite the disproportionately Republican makeup of the interim electorate. But the ire of seniors and the non-affluent generally is just one of the perils of the plan.

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The Tea Party movement, which claims it is driven by a resistance to taxation, is really motivated by a widespread sense of economic disenfranchisement, that is now reaching everyone except the superrich. The populist urgency that underscores all of the Tea Party’s energy is not inherently linked to Grover Norquist’s anti-American “Club for Growth”, but the movement has no leader honest enough to openly demand progressive policy outcomes.

Instead, the popular movement has been co-opted by the establishment crowd that caters to corporate interests, foreign and domestic, and which seeks to shift the tax burden away from wealthy multinationals and billionaire investors, and toward the average American middle class and working family. While many Tea Party adherents say they are independent voters angered by corporate greed and government spending, they have routinely and unquestioningly signed up for rapacious budget reform that continues the pattern of transferring most Americans’ hard-earned household wealth to mega-corporations.

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The view taken by some in Washington that major reductions in the United States’ national debt can be achieved without addressing revenues is essentially a pledge to do nothing serious about the debt or deficit. The reason: the ideology of supply-side tax-cut-only social policy not only requires, but admires “deficit spending”.

Some critics of this way of thinking, most notably fiscally conservative, pro-middle-class Republicans, have called it “voodoo economics”—a mystical and unverifiable faith tradition posing as economic policy, which only serves to divert wealth away from the middle class, draining the federal budget to deliver wealth to the already wealthy.

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There is only one reason to “slash” budgets, due to fiscal hardship provoked by irresponsible tax giveaways, lawless market manipulation and the ensuing economic recession: the same failure of imagination and recklessness that led to the economic collapse of 2007-2008.

There is quite literally no corner of this country that is so “broke” that it is “in danger” of collapse. The rapidly spreading “budget emergency” is emergent only in the sense that it is suddenly the thought engine driving one major party’s ideological and partisan attack on the economic and political levers that give middle class Americans influence over their government.

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