Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Recovery, relief, reform, reconstruction: We need plans for all four now!

Lots of folks seem to pick one over the rest, or confuse 'em one with another.

• Recovery: an immediate return to full employment globally by massive deficit spending now.
• Relief: a tax rebate plan over four years to shift trillions in national debt burden from households to Uncle Sawbuck.
• Reform: harness the free-range corporations to the national plow and tax wealth like a borrowed mule.
• Reconstruction: This is a two-parter: 1) A 4-year plan to build a green American production platform, and 2) a balanced-trade dollar.

Here's a fr-instance: Nelly-bell winner Joseph A Stiglitz poses relief against recovery:

In America today, with an overhang of household debt and high uncertainty, tax cuts are likely to be ineffective (as they were in Japan in the 1990s). Much, if not most, of last February's US tax cut went into savings...

-- Ineffective, he means, at stimulating spending needed to spur recovery. Right. But still much needed to provide debt relief. Uncle has to take down both these targets, by big working-class tax cuts and massive direct spending of his own -- or even, okay, indirect spending through the states.

Stig would have us pull off a revenue-neutral tax shift from the small skilled workers to the portfoliate and the high-fee professionalate. Fine, but two-phase it, Stig: Now relieve the wagery with a massive payroll tax holiday, plus -- why not? -- a rebate of the entire content of the Social Security trust funds.

"You earned it, you damn well need it, so I'm givin' it back, cowpokes."