"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal..." - Thomas Jefferson, July 4, 1776

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." - Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 19, 1863

"When was America all about everyone being equal?” - Florida contractor and Gingrich fundraiser Mary Forristall, quoted in the Washington Post on Jan. 28, 2012

There you have it: America's great political debate summarized in three quotes. Forristall is not the first conservative, and definitely won't be the last, to dislike equality. Our history is littered with a surprising number of quotes just like it. Most of us think the ideas of Jefferson and Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. firmly planted equality in American soil and made it as apple-pie all-American as you could imagine, but the debate goes on. From Alexander Hamilton to John C. Calhoun to the Social Darwinists of the 1880s to Ayn Rand, William Buckley, and Jesse Helms of the last century and the tea partiers of this, there has been a long line of conservatives who are appalled and terrified by the idea of equality. There are a lot of remarkably blunt quotes on how absurd the idea of equality is from all kinds of conservatives which I featured in my book, "The Progressive Revolution: How the Best of America Came To Be."

When conservatives want to be a little less overt about their disdain for the notion of equality, they will say that, of course they believe in equality of opportunity, they just oppose equality of results. Besides being a ridiculous straw man (no one I have ever met has argued for absolute "equality of results,” or the idea that it isn't fine for people to get rewarded when they build and sell great products), they almost always immediately undercut their own argument by proposing cuts in student grants and loans, public education, Head Start and child health programs that get kids off to a better start in life. They are all for equality, they say, but never want to extend equal protections under the law to new classes of people being discriminated against. They support equality but don’t care if people with illnesses or pre-existing conditions can’t get health care coverage. They are for equal rights under the law but support eliminating funding for legal services, and allowing bankers who commit financial fraud to skate by without ever being investigated. They think equality is wonderful, but are indignant that progressives ask that millionaires and billionaires pay at least as high a tax rate as their secretaries.

Conservatives are on the defensive on equality issues to a degree they haven’t been in at least four decades, and they are flailing around pretty badly trying to defend their patrons in the 1 percent. More straw men are being created than in the Land of Oz. The Washington Post has had two big pieces in their editorial pages the last two days with conservative writers desperately trying to defend wealthy people from having to pay a fair share of taxes.

First up, with the lead editorial on the front page of The Washington Post Sunday Outlook section, was a piece by James Q. Wilson with the monster-sized headline “Don’t Blame the Rich.” The Post’s sub-headline was “Scholar James Q. Wilson argues that taxing the wealthy won’t end poverty.” Straw man number one: I’d be hard pressed to ascertain what progressives were blaming “the rich” for. I, appropriately, blame a lot of the big Wall Street bankers for crashing the economy through financial fraud, forcing the rest of us to bail them out, and then whining because we don’t love them anymore. Likewise, I blame oil and coal companies for polluting the air and threatening the earth with catastrophic climate change. I blame health insurance companies for dropping millions of people out of coverage when they get sick. I blame big business execs who outsource jobs from America so they can pay slave wages in China and Third World countries. But I have nothing against rich people generally.

If you are a manufacturer who has created a great product and employs a lot of people to make it while paying them a decent wage and making sure they have health benefits, and gets rich as a result, I have nothing but love for you. If you are a small business owner that provides amazing service for your community and gets rich as a result, that is tremendous. If you are a community banker who gives small business and home and auto loans to the people in your community, and make great money, God bless you. If you run a website that produces great content with a huge audience, and you reap the rewards, wonderful. I blame entrepreneurs like that for nothing, and am thrilled for their success. But I still want to see them, and everyone with the ability to, pay their fair share of taxes.

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Credit: Jared Bernstein

Behind almost all of the disturbing issues raised by Mitt Romney's jaw-dropping tax returns stands one largely unchallenged conservative article of faith. Much lower tax rates for capital gains than income earned through labor, conservatives claim, spur investment, catalyze economic growth and fuel job creation. But if that Republican theology isn't true, then the United States has for decades done nothing more than deliver a massive windfall to the wealthiest Americans needing it least. Unfortunately, that's precisely what the data show. As it turns out, lower capital gains taxes increase income inequality - and not investment - in America.

As Paul Krugman recounted two weeks ago, the historically low capital gains rate enjoyed by Mitt Romney hasn't always been 15 percent. In the not-too-distant past, it reached 39.9 percent and with the Reagan tax reform of 1986 was briefly the same as the top tax rate on income. But successive presidents of both parties lowered the capital gains rate on investment income because they believed, the Washington Post explained, "it spurs more investment in the U.S. economy, benefiting all Americans."

But as Jared Bernstein demonstrated with the chart above, there's no evidence to support that claim. Bernstein found that the business cycle, not acts of Congress, drive investment in the U.S.

Hard to see anything in the picture supporting the view that either the level or changes in cap gains taxes play a determinant role in investment decisions.

Remember, the ostensible reason for the favoritism in tax treatment here is to incentivize more investment and faster productivity growth. But that's not in the data and the reason it's not in the data is because investors aren't nearly as elastic to cap gains rates as their lobbyists say they are (more precisely, they'll carefully time their realizations to maximize their gains around rate changes, but that's not real economic activity-that's tax planning).

Reviewing other analyses, Brad Plummer of the Washington Post concurred with that assessment that low capital gains taxes don't necessarily jump-start investment in the economy:

The top tax rate on investment income has bounced up and down over the past 80 years—from as high as 39.9 percent in 1977 to just 15 percent today—yet investment just appears to grow with the cycle, seemingly unaffected...

Meanwhile, Troy Kravitz and Len Burman of the Urban Institute have shown that, over the past 50 years, there's no correlation between the top capital gains tax rate and U.S. economic growth—even if you allow for a lag of up to five years.

Billionaire Warren Buffett, the inspiration for the "Buffett Rule" advocated by President Obama and his Democratic allies, couldn't agree more. As he told The New York Times last year:

"I have worked with investors for 60 years and I have yet to see anyone -- not even when capital gains rates were 39.9 percent in 1976-77—shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain. People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off."

But if lower capital gains tax rates have had little impact on investment, they have had an outsized impact on income inequality in the United States.

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If nothing else, Mitt Romney seems dedicated to proving that repetition of a lie will make it true. On no point is Romney's tilting against the windmill of truth more comically pathetic than his long-ago debunked claim that President Obama "did not cause this recession, but he made it worse." After a tidal wave of fact-checkers demolished his mythology last summer, Romney on June 30 pretended, "I didn't say that things are worse" before reinstating the falsehood in his stump speech just days later. Now, Mitt has a new twist on his "Obama made it worse" fraud, declaring in light of the improving economic outlook that "It's getting better not because of him, it's in spite of him and what he's done."

Sadly for the myth-maker from Massachusetts, the numbers and the overwhelming consensus of economists - including John McCain's 2008 brain trust - demand Mitt Romney give credit where credit is due.

That, of course, is something the serial deceiver Romney is refusing to do, even as he acknowledges the economy is improving. As Mitt put it in New Hampshire ten days ago:

"I'm sure the president will want to take credit for it, for any improvement. Guess what? He doesn't deserve it."

Two days later during a GOP debate, Romney repackaged his con job this way:

"The president is going to try and take responsibility for things getting better. You know, it's like the rooster taking responsibility for the sunrise. He didn't do it," Romney said. "In fact, what he did was make things harder for America to get going again."

But back on planet Earth where the force of gravity still applies and the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, Romney's slander shuold receive the ridicule it rightly deserves.

This summer, Time blasted Romney's accusation that "the recession is deeper because of our President," concluding "that Romney's claim has no credible basis" because "there's no credible economic data showing that Obama has inflamed our economic problems." As Greg Sargent noted on June 27, both the AP and the Washington Post's own fact-checker demolished Romney's talking point on the recession which the NBER declared over in June 2009. Confronted three days later by NBC producer Sue Kroll about the growing economy, modest job gains and surging stock market, Romney simply denied he ever made the charge:

"I didn't say that things are worse...What I said was that economy hasn't turned around."

Nevertheless, just four days later Romney marked Independence Day by returning to his lie. As the New York Times reported:

Speaking at the annual July Fourth parade here on Monday, Mr. Romney told a crowd of supporters and passersby, "the recession is deeper because of our president," adding, "it's seen an anemic recovery because of our president."

Mr. Romney made a similar assertion earlier when reporters had pressed him on the point near the parade staging grounds, after initially seeming to limit his commentary to the president's handling of the recovery, which he said, "has been slower and more painful,'' But then he went ahead and said it, that the president "made the recession worse."

As it turns out, it's not just the tidal wave of reporters and fact-checkers that washed away the mud Mitt Romney hurled at President Obama on the economy. A bevy of economists, including ones who worked for Romney endorser John McCain, long ago concluded that Barack Obama saved the U.S. economy from calamity.

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On Thursday morning, Jim DeMint went on "Morning Joe" to pimp his new book -- Now or Never: Saving America from Slightly Higher Taxes on Rich People Economic Collapse -- and peddled a bunch of lies. All of which went completely unchallenged by the panel, of course.

It all started with Scarborough serving up a nice, fat softball to DeMint.

SCARBOROUGH: We were just saying earlier in the show one of the big problems over the past ten years has been the fact that you had a Republican president who doubled the national debt, with a Republican Congress for six years. Now you have a Democratic president who is going to double the debt again...what do we do to stop the bleeding?

DEMINT: Well, that's what the book's all about. 2012 could be our last chance to turn this thing around. The only way the Republicans in the House now can stop the bleeding is if they shut the government down.

Great plan!

And notice: there's absolutely no mention of the fact that taxes are currently at historic lows, and were cut under the previous administration before the country launched two wars, created a massive new domestic security agency -- and fell into the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression.

None of that has contributed to the deficit at all. Nope, it's just "spending" that's the problem. Amazing.

And it just got worse.

DEMINT: Now we've got the tension between those who want centralized power, government control of education, health care, transportation, energy -- and Republicans who I think finding their footing around their core principles of we need to devolve power out of Washington, we need to decentralize, because that's what makes America work. [...]

The Democrats are there to beat us. Every policy that they introduce is to centralize power. They are completely incapable of cutting spending because their constiuency is based on dependency on government and those who want more government.

Nice racist dogwhistle at the end there. But how many lies can DeMint cram into two paragraphs?

First, you think someone on the panel would point out to DeMint that government payrolls have dropped by 500,000 jobs under Obama. Isn't that what Teabaggers want? Smaller government?

Also, someone may have pointed out that energy companies and the health care industry are making record profits. Again, kind of an odd thing to happen under a bunch of socialists who want to nationalize everything.

Hey, Brokaw and Meacham. You call yourselves journalists? How can these two let this BS go unchallenged? Awful.

Never thought I'd write these words, but Krugman is depressing me: (h/t Vicci Rocco)

It’s time to start calling the current situation what it is: a depression. True, it’s not a full replay of the Great Depression, but that’s cold comfort. Unemployment in both America and Europe remains disastrously high. Leaders and institutions are increasingly discredited. And democratic values are under siege.

On that last point, I am not being alarmist. On the political as on the economic front it’s important not to fall into the “not as bad as” trap. High unemployment isn’t O.K. just because it hasn’t hit 1933 levels; ominous political trends shouldn’t be dismissed just because there’s no Hitler in sight.

That's right, Paul Krugman just pulled the Godwin card. But as anyone who has studied periods of great economic strife in history, this isn't a flippant thing. Howie Klein continues:

I've had friends who have been saying we've been in a Depression since the last year of Bush's disastrous term. But they don't have Nobel Prizes in economics. NY Times columnist/Princeton economics professor Paul Krugman is a Nobel laureate and he's managed to not call it a depression-- until this week. And not just a depression, but one that is already starting to inspire a fascist reaction, the way the Great Depression of the 1930s did in much of the world. He points out that the euro crisis "is killing the European dream. The shared currency, which was supposed to bind nations together, has instead created an atmosphere of bitter acrimony." Spain just elected a far right government. Italy and Greece had far right governments imposed on them by banksters backed by Germany.

It's a like a rubber band: you can only stretch it so far and if you stretch beyond that, it snaps and breaks. Economically, we appear to be right at that breaking point. You cannot steal the livelihoods and futures from so many people, demanding austerity and sacrifice, while simultaneously protecting those who are living large and refusing to hold anyone accountable for this kind of injustice.

We've seen what this kind of economic disparity did in the 1930s and it sure looks like we're barreling right back over that cliff again. More Krugman:

Nobody familiar with Europe’s history can look at this resurgence of hostility without feeling a shiver. Yet there may be worse things happening.

Right-wing populists are on the rise from Austria, where the Freedom Party (whose leader used to have neo-Nazi connections) runs neck-and-neck in the polls with established parties, to Finland, where the anti-immigrant True Finns party had a strong electoral showing last April. And these are rich countries whose economies have held up fairly well. Matters look even more ominous in the poorer nations of Central and Eastern Europe.

Last month the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development documented a sharp drop in public support for democracy in the “new E.U.” countries, the nations that joined the European Union after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Not surprisingly, the loss of faith in democracy has been greatest in the countries that suffered the deepest economic slumps.

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Credit: ThinkProgress

When President Obama on Tuesday declared that decades of Republican trickle-down economics "never worked," conservatives were predictably apoplectic.

But for all of their protests of "class warfare", "socialism" and worse, Obama was being kind to the Republican ideologues. After all, as the historical record shows, from economic growth and job creation to stock market performance and just about every other indicator of the health of American capitalism, the modern U.S. economy has almost always done better under Democratic presidents. Despite GOP mythology to the contrary, America generally gained more jobs and grew faster when taxes were higher (even much higher) and income inequality lower. And while the U.S. recovery from the Bush recession remains painfully slow, most economists - including the nonpartisan CBO and some of John McCain's own 2008 advisers - believe President Obama saved it from the abyss.

(Click a link below for the details on each.)

• Job Creation and Economic Growth
• The Stock Market
• Income Inequality
• National Debt
• The Bush Recession and the Obama Recovery

Job Creation and Economic Growth

To be sure, George W. Bush provided the perfect bookend to era of modern Republican economic management ushered by Herbert Hoover. The verdict on President Bush's reign of ruin was pronounced even before Barack Obama took the oath of office. Just days after the Washington Post documented that George W. Bush presided over the worst eight-year economic performance in the modern American presidency, the New York Times on January 24, 2009 featured an analysis ("Economic Setbacks That Define the Bush Years") comparing presidential performance going back to Eisenhower. As the Times showed, George W. Bush, the first MBA president, was a historic failure when it came to expanding GDP, producing jobs and fueling stock market growth.

On January 9, 2009, the Republican-friendly Wall Street Journal summed it up with an article titled simply, "Bush on Jobs: the Worst Track Record on Record." (The Journal's interactive table quantifies his staggering failure relative to every post-World War II president.) The meager one million jobs created under President Bush didn't merely pale in comparison to the 23 million produced during Bill Clinton's tenure. In September 2009, the Congressional Joint Economic Committee charted Bush's job creation disaster, the worst since Hoover:

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Although it sounds like good news, I'd hold off on the cheering just yet:

The American unemployment rate unexpectedly fell to its lowest level in two and a half years in November, despite the many global crises batting against the economy.
The unemployment rate fell to 8.6 percent, after having been stuck around 9 percent for most of 2011, the Labor Department said Friday. Additionally, a separate government survey found that the nation’s employers added 120,000 jobs last month, after adding 100,000 jobs in October.

So lower unemployment rate and slightly more jobs added this month. Good, right? Well....

The jobless rate fell partly because more workers got jobs, but also because about 315,000 workers dropped out of the labor force, and the jobless rate counts only people who are actively looking for work. Even so, the country still has a backlog of more than 13 million unemployed workers, whose periods of unemployment averaged an all-time high of 40.9 weeks.

“They say businesses are refusing to look at résumés from the unemployed,” said Esther Perry, 59, of Bedford, Mass., who participated in a recent report on unemployed workers put together by USAction, a liberal coalition. “What do you think my chances are? Once unemployment runs out, I don’t know what I will do.”

So now we're facing more chronically unemployed people who are simply falling off the rolls, never to be considered by a politician again. As Robert Borosage from Campaign for America's Future puts it:

“This fragile growth now faces fierce headwinds, with austerity in Europe and Great Britain driving those economies into recession. The financial crisis in Europe will impact zombie banks in the United States.

“While it looks like that Congress finally may use small band aids to attempt to stop the economic bleeding like the payroll tax extension and extending unemployment benefits, they are not doing what is needed to push this economy back in to firing on all cylinders.”

“We need Congress and the Federal Reserve to act now to put people back to work. Use the opportunity posed by record low interest rates to rebuild our decrepit infrastructure. Provide young workers with jobs in urban corps and green corps and the non-profit sector. Provide aid to states and localities to avoid more devastating layoffs of teachers and cops.”

As I wrote in a piece a couple of months ago, I am glad to be in the political party that is actually having a debate about how to revive the American middle class, because I think it is one of the two most central and important economic debates of our generation (the other being how do we convert our worldwide economy into one that doesn’t cook the planet). Given that the Republicans’ only big focus is how to keep taxes low on the rich and government too weak to function, I am happy my party’s debate is a little more focused on where it needs to be. The only problem I have with the debate is that too many of the establishment Democrats think it can be done without challenging the wealthy special interest status quo, the concentration of power in both our economy and politics.

Here’s one example of what I am talking about: a Larry Summers op-ed in the Washington Post just before Thanksgiving entitled “Three Ways to Combat Inequality.” I appreciate Summers caring enough about inequality to write something about it, but I found the op-ed disturbing (although not surprising) in that he totally buys into the establishment conventional wisdom that the reasons for increased inequality “lies substantially in changes in technology and globalization.” He goes on to say that on one side (presumably the side of crazy lefties), “the debate is framed in zero-sum terms, and the disappointing lack of income growth for middle-class workers is blamed on the success of the wealthy”. After that classic swipe, he talks about how the right wing is wrong not to worry about the issue at all, and then lists his three solutions: don’t reward the wealthy with special concessions, “pro-fairness, pro-growth tax reform,” and making sure there is more equity in areas like education and health care.

I agree with Summers on his three general policy proposals, although I suspect we would disagree on the details of those policy ideas — for example, I strongly support taxing speculation on Wall Street through a bill like Harkin and DeFazio’s Financial Transaction Tax, and Summers strongly opposed the idea while at the White House, and I strongly supported a public option on health care when Summers was happy to trade it away. But none of these three “solutions” do anything to more fundamentally solve anything, which Summers tacitly admits by saying upfront that inequality is pretty much inevitable because of globalization and technology. Summers, along with his mentor Bob Rubin and his protégé Tim Geithner, are dead wrong on their central approach to economic policy, which encourages “the market” (as they define it, at least) to do what it will and uses government to soften the rough edges and keep things from being quite so miserable for at least the poor. The fact that these proposals ignore the very heart of the matter, which is the power relations that drive our modern economy, speaks very loudly.

The reason that economic inequality, as well as the depth of the unemployment problem, is so much worse in the United States than in virtually every other modern, developed economy in the world is because labor unions are so much weaker here, and because our industries — especially our financial institutions — are so much more concentrated. The fact that countries like Germany, Sweden, Canada, Denmark, and Australia all weathered the worldwide financial crisis better than we did is because their unions kept wages relatively high so people had money to buy things, and because their big banks were not nearly so dominant a party of their economy. If globalization and technology were the big and inexorable causes of economic inequality, then every country would have the USA’s bad numbers on that score, but they don’t. Those two causes, which are so popular with conservative economists, are certainly a factor, but concentration of wealth flows more than any other thing from concentration of power. It was true in the ancient Roman Empire, as wealth basically flowed from the size of people’s armies and their friendship with the Caesars. Throughout the middle ages, the same patterns remained true. In the late 1800s in this country, concentration of wealth came about partly because of industrialization, but mostly because the big corporate trusts of the robber barons ran government through open bribery. In the 1920s, concentration of wealth rose to incredible new heights again, as the conservative pro-big business Republicans controlled government and big corporate trusts paid little in taxes, broke unions viciously, and speculated in the stock market with impunity.

Today, with unions as weak as they have been since the 1920s and major industries as concentrated as they have been since the 1890s, we have tremendous inequality and a disappearing middle class. That disappearing middle class includes a breakdown of small business in sector after sector as well, as the small guys have more and more trouble competing with big business. Four companies now control 70 percent of general retail sales; four grocery chains control 55 percent of grocery sales; three firms control 80 percent of beer sales, and two control 70 percent of toothpaste sales; five big oil companies control 60 percent of retail gas stations; four accounting companies lock down 70 percent of the accounting work done in this country. I could go on and on, in industry after industry, from telecom to agribusiness, from technology to pharmaceuticals. These huge conglomerates have destroyed tens of millions of small businesses, and even more jobs. They have broken unions and driven down wages. Their power is breaking the middle class in this country.

You know the biggest problem with all this concentration of wealth? These firms become so politically and economically powerful that government becomes their handmaiden: they are the ultimate Too Big to Fail companies. As a result, they distort our economy and government in terrible ways. One of the most essential reading items I have seen in a long time is a new report out of Bloomberg about the secret Federal Reserve loans to the Too Big to Fail banks during the financial crisis of 2008-9. It is an incredible read, documenting how much money was shelled out by Ben Bernanke with no strings attached to the biggest banks in America. They didn’t have to loan the money out to businesses, or invest it in promising new companies that might create jobs, or write down any loans to homeowners. And with virtually no interest loans (0.01 percent), these banks not only survived the financial crisis, but grew much bigger in size, made massive profits, and paid themselves record breaking bonuses. It is not an exaggeration to say that this is corruption on a scale never before seen in human history. The details are worth reading, even though it will probably make you ill.

Larry Summers, one of the two key architects of the repeal of Glass-Steagall and other financial deregulation of the late ’90s, doesn’t have any policy proposals in his what to do about economic inequality op-ed relating to countering the kind of concentration of wealth and power that gave us this kind of backroom dealing — deals that exacerbated the concentration of wealth even more. It is predictable but very sad. What we need are economic thinkers who also understand the most basic theory of the founding fathers, which is pluralism. Pluralism was that core idea of Madison’s that only by having power widely distributed could a democracy survive. That core idea is being fundamentally threatened today, because big banks on Wall Street and the other dominant economic powers that be have too much power (both economic and political), and unions and consumers and small businesses and the rest of the 99% have too little. Changing that will do far more to solve economic inequality than all of the policy ideas suggested by establishment thinkers like Summers combined.

It's difficult to find a place of gratitude during a time of great economic strife, when so many Americans live at or near poverty while the top one percent see their income exponentially grow. It's harder still to do so when finding solutions are rarely brought up in an intellectually honest way. Still, Fareed Zakaria thinks there is much to be thankful for and suggests--rather radically for a talking head on a cable news program--that our problems lie not in the economic sphere (so stop the fear mongering that we're just thisclose to experiencing a Greece-like crisis) but in the political:

The U.S., by contrast, remains one of the world's most competitive economies. It is home to the leading companies in the most advanced industries, houses the largest capital markets and continues to spawn new companies and, indeed, whole new industries. It exports everything from aircraft to entertainment to healthcare products around the world.

Its demographics are strikingly healthy: It will be the only rich country in the world to actually increase its population over the next 30 years - which means more young workers, producers, entrepreneurs and taxpayers.

America's problems are not economic, demographic or technological. They are political. Simple policy measures can change our fate.

If we built out our infrastructure, kept monetary policy pro-growth and reformed our tax code to encourage business investment, we would have growth, a manageable deficit and a bright future.

I will go one further than Zakaria is willing to go and agree that our problems stem from the political sphere, but that it is specifically, because we still operate under the false assumption that all ideas are equal and valid. We have had thirty years for Reaganomics to prove their worth. They have failed. And yet we still have politicians talking about how lower taxes are necessary to help job creators. We're still arguing about climate change and evolution as if the science isn't settled. We're still talking about how we need to fight al Qaeda in Afghanistan, even though there are less than 100 al Qaeda members, if that, in the country. We're still pretending that the American Dream has become unattainable to more and more citizens because we're still arguing for the same failed policies by the same wrong-headed pundits instead of taking them off the table.

Jennifer Granholm spoke with Fareed Zakaria about where American jobs have gone and offers up a perfect case study to show that despite their skill at repeating it ad nauseam, the GOP's answer for jobs just won't work:

Among the lessons that hit home the hardest occurred back in 2003, when she tried to keep an Electrolux plant in Greenville, Mich. (the "Refrigerator Capital of the World"). Then-Gov. Granholm offered the company all sorts of incentives, including tax breaks and worker concessions, only to be told by Electrolux that "there is nothing you can do to compensate for the fact we can pay $1.17 an hour for labor in Mexico."

On the factory's last day, as Electrolux was completing the move to Ciudad Juárez and the last of the 3,000 employees were laid off, she remembers one of them coming up to her and saying, "I'm 48. I went from high school to factory. All I know is how to make refrigerators. Governor, who is going to hire me?"

Granholm rightfully points out that whither Michigan has gone, so too will the whole country until we start having a conversation about keeping American jobs that doesn't not solely include tax cuts and concessions from labor.

One of the most immediate and obvious ways that we can stop this trend of outsourcing American manufacturing jobs is to stop these stupid free trade agreements that benefit corporations to the disservice of American workers and start working on fair trade agreements, which include tariffs for goods produced outside the country, as Thom Hartmann describes it here:

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