Interesting article in the Washington Post by James Hohmann, Breanne Deppisch and Joanie Greve: "Tension over adding 'triggers' to the tax bill highlights the Republican identity crisis over deficits".

I have to explain this to you because it is so nonsensical, and the media is doing an absolutely terrible job of even describing - much less explaining - what Bob Corker is up to. And yet you need to understand this because it exposes the Republican tax scam brilliantly and Corker doesn't even realize it.

So, first of all, let's step back and just set aside for a moment the whole Republican tax scam and just talk for a second about macroeconomic policy during times of boom and bust, okay, the large economic policies of a nation as that nation goes through the regular cycles the capitalism brings us, typically a six, seven, eight year cycle of boom and bust.

You have booms and then you have bust and then boom and then bust and then roughly every 80 years that cycle goes totally insane and becomes insanely toxic and you have a huge bust after a huge boom.

So typically the conventional wisdom - and it's conventional wisdom because it's been demonstrated to work over literally hundreds and hundreds of years - is that when the economy is really doing well, when you've got unemployment below five percent, which is right now, when you've got corporate profits at an all-time historic high, higher than ever in the history of the world, which is now, when you've got rich people making more money than rich people have ever made before in the history of Earth, which is now, when you've got those conditions - corporations are awash in cash, money is easy to borrow, any company that wants to expand can easily do it, you can float a bond, you can do an IPO, there is a ton of money floating around.

During those times that is when you raise taxes in order to accomplish the things that government should accomplish.

-Thom

(What do you think? Tell us here.)