I think this reflects my belief that there are a lot of really stupid (uneducated?) people in this country. Who are these people? Are they the poor, middle class, rich?

Yes, I feel more confident since the Dems took over Congress, but the money situation is not something they can fix in one or two years. We will be digging ourselves out of this Bush created hole for a generation.

Be a blessing to someone today.

most of the great expansions of our economy have come as direct result of tax decreases

The reality is a lot more complicated. The consensus among right-leaning economists* like Fed chairman Ben Bernake is that if you cut taxes and if you cut spending by a nearly equal amount, you will see a slight improvement in economic growth. (As left-leaning Keynes demonstrated, you can get an even bigger bang for the buck if you increase social spending, but plan to pay down the debt before it becomes a drag on capital markets - but that's another story).

However, if you cut taxes and increase spending - and Bush and the GOP congress did both to an unprecedented degree - you will eventually dramatically decrease growth. That's because you inevitably have to raise taxes significantly more than you cut them to make up the cost of borrowing. At the same time you also have to cut spending, which also slows economic growth.

The GOP has given us the worst of both worlds, and we'll eventually - and inevitably - have to pay the piper. So live it up while you can...until the Chinese come to collect your debt.

* As opposed to supply-side snake-oil salesmen who claim you can pay for tax cuts exclusively through increased revenues from economic expansion. This has not happened anywhere on Earth in human history.

"The Commerce Department reported Thursday [Feb. 1] that the savings rate for all of 2006 was a negative 1 percent, meaning that not only did people spend all the money they earned but they also dipped into savings or increased borrowing to finance purchases."

I homed in on the comment above...

Our household isn't dipping into savings, but we're certainly treading water WRT our rate of savings in recent years--and at a time we should be stepping up our efforts in planning for both my husband's retirement and our high school-aged daughter's college expenses.

Recently, I wagged three years of checkbook registers under my husband's nose to satisfy him that his net take-home pay had risen a total of just $3 per week over the last three years, 2003 through 2006! He could not, would not believe it, as he had earned satisfactory pay raises each year. I directed his attention to the incredible rise in his weekly payroll deduction for family health insurance coverage. Medical inflation, clearly, has taken a tremendous toll in our family's ability to step up our rate of savings!

Our household *did* recognize a bump in his take home pay this calendar year. Why? His employer has opted to do away with Christmas bonuses, extend employees slighty higher pay raises across the board, and apply the difference to their (the employer's) even higher health insurance premium costs this year! Where will it end?