The fact of the matter is, corporations and businesses are not going to hire people to stand around in an empty factory. They're not going to place brand new employees behind a counter that won't see a single customer. They're not going to hire anyone, because people aren't buying anything. John Boehner's address to the Economy Club of Washington on Monday highlighted a very tired GOP talking point; that deregulation and cutting corporate taxes will stimulate job growth. It will definitely help those businesses to increase their profit margins a bit more, which will make them better able to expand when demand does finally increase. However, when consumerism is weak, as it is right now, businesses are not going to hire. People will stay unemployed, will continue to struggle with debt and bills, and will not purchase the things that stimulate businesses to hire. It's vicious cycle, but it has almost nothing to do with corporate tax cuts, regulations, or the national debt.

In 1929, a debt-heavy economy collapsed (sound familiar?) and the Great Depression began. In the last 100 years, this is the only economically comparable financial crisis to the one we face now. The reason this one went wasn't nearly as deep as the one in the 30's, is that we now have a network of social safety nets subsidized by the government or paid for over the lifetime by taxpayers (many of which were put in place after the Great Depression). The Depression maintained a nearly 25% unemployment rate for several years, and GDP did not show growth for much of that time. Compare that to this recession, in which we've fluctuated around a 10% unemployment rate and GDP has been positive since the Obama administration's first stimulus (ARRA) in February of 2009. Franklin Delano Roosevelt implemented a plan of tax incentives for businesses and heavily government subsidized infrastructure projects. These programs; a system of federal spending that has been characterized by Republicans today as a "stimulus" (and it is), allowed the US economy to recover to the point where it was healthy enough to meet the military challenges of World War II. By contrast, the Obama White House is proposing very similar economic interventions to stimulate our own economic growth. The difference is that a stimulus must target consumers to bolster hiring. Our national economy is built on a middle-class whose consumerism accounts for nearly 80% of our GDP. A weak demand means a weak jobs market, and no amount of deregulation or corporate tax slashing will change that.

Finally, investment banking and other financial institutions must be brought to justice. The very same lenders that created the housing crisis, and subsequently our economic stagnation, have not seen so much as an indictment since the crash in 2007. James Carville recently said on CNN, the Obama White House must fire and indict; show economic analysts attached to big banking the door, and indict the people that got us into this mess. The markets are already volatile, and investors may actually appreciate some accountability among the very banks that cost them so dearly. In addition, middle-class Americans are sitting in homes do far underwater that it's unlikely that they'll pay off their debt within their lifetime. That debt, those real economy dollars, are being injected into investment banks that are already flush. Brett Arends, of the Wall Street Journal, advocated for a massive national default. Homeowners, he says, that are underwater need to take a more corporate mindset to contracts and debts; if it's looking unwinnable, walk away and start over. After all, the real economic stall here is debt; $13.3 trillion of it just among American homeowners.

Boehner and congressional Republicans can talk all they like about stimulating hiring, but as long as they're attaching it to corporate tax cuts and the national debt, they're not going to be successful in implementation. Obama wants to hand tax incentives to businesses that won't have much use for the new employees (other than to get the tax deductions). Instead, we need to start looking at the one group here that seems to be overlooked, though it's also the "elephant" on the House floor; our overburdened middle class. I'm not advocating any socialist policies, I'm advocating acknowledging what's really the problem. If demand increases, businesses won't need tax cuts to grow... they'll have revenue.