Corporations are people too, my friend!

Mitt Romney makes the case:


Thom Hartmann has another view:

People support higher taxes to reduce the deficit

Grover Norquist rules our world.

Twenty-three polls taken over the last 8 months - including Gallup, Rasmussen, CNN, New York Times, Washington Post/ABC, CBS, Bloomberg and others - show the public supports additional taxes for deficit reduction by margins of more than two-to-one.

The list is HERE, at Bruce Bartlett's "Capital Gains and Games" blog.

"A long malaise seems like the optimistic scenario"

Nobel Prize-winner and former chief economist at The World Bank, Joseph Stiglitz writing in The Financial Times offers a bleak appraisal of the moment: the US can borrow at extremely low rates to make the investments in infrastructure and targeted job-creation that could jump-start economic growth (which is also the key to longer-term deficit reduction), but the politics of austerity make any effective policies or optimistic scenarios impossible:

Pre-crisis, America, and to a large extent the world economy, was sustained by a bubble. The breaking of the bubble has left a legacy of excess leverage and real estate. Consumption will therefore remain weak and austerity on both sides of the Atlantic now ensures the state will not fill the void. Given this, it is not surprising that companies are unwilling to invest – even those that can get access to capital…