Medicare is not just any program. It's a program that saves lives and helps older Americans stay healthy. Since 1965, the Medicare system has successfully and efficiently provided millions of seniors in Nevada and across the country with the quality health services that they have paid for all their working lives. In addition to Social Security, the Medicare program is one of the most important social safety nets this country has ever known.

Unfortunately, 47 years after Medicare's creation, the program is under assault by Washington politicians who don't understand just how much Nevada's senior citizens depend on these guaranteed healthcare benefits.

My opponent in the campaign for the United States Senate is one of those politicians.

On April 15, 2011, then Congressman Dean Heller voted for a budget proposal put forward by Wisconsin Republican Congressman and now vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan that would essentially end Medicare.

Then, on May 25, 2011, following his appointment to the U.S. Senate after the resignation of Senator John Ensign, Heller had the opportunity to vote for the proposal once again. Not only did he take that opportunity, he relished it. He said he was "proud" to be the only member of Congress that voted for the Ryan plan twice.

Why is that significant? Because according to the conservative, pro-business Wall Street Journal, the Ryan budget proposal would "essentially end Medicare" and turn the program over to the private insurance industry.

Heller's proposal would end guaranteed benefits for seniors by providing a voucher to buy insurance on the private market. This would make the system less efficient and more expensive for older Americans compared to traditional Medicare. In fact, while health care costs would increase for all those who receive vouchers, the vouchers would not increase in value to keep up with the costs.

Independent analysts such as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities have shown that this plan would dramatically increase the average premium for Medicare beneficiaries in Nevada and across the country. According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, the increase would be approximately $6,000 a year for the same coverage they currently receive under Medicare! The average senior on Social Security receives nearly $15,000 a year in benefits, $6,000 is almost half the income many seniors live on. If the Ryan-Heller budget became law, where would our seniors find the additional $6,000 to pay for their health care? To add insult to injury, if Ryan and Heller had it their way, seniors in Nevada would also have to pay $15 million more for prescription drugs starting this year.

Some politicians and so-called fact checkers claim the proposal I just described doesn't technically "end" Medicare. They are wrong. The seniors' healthcare system that Senator Dean Heller proudly voted twice to implement is unrecognizable to the Medicare program that Nevada seniors depend on today.

Instead of relying on guaranteed benefits to take care of their healthcare needs, seniors would be at the mercy of private insurance company bureaucrats who for the first time would be allowed to come between patients and their doctors.

Seniors would be forced to pay thousands of dollars more a year for the coverage they are already receiving. And if the voucher doesn't cover the service and you can't pay? Tough luck. You're on your own.

You can call that Medicare if you want -- but that's not the program created 47 years ago.

The reality is that Senator Heller's plan terminates the Medicare program and creates a whole new system where private insurance companies are in charge.

That is not Medicare.

Just because some people claim that Atlantic City is like Las Vegas, that doesn't make that town in New Jersey anything close to the Entertainment Capital of the World.

I oppose Senator Heller's plan, but I also recognize that we need to take actions to address the long term solvency of the current Medicare system.

We must make improvements to strengthen the program like reducing waste, fraud and abuse in the program; saving billions of dollars in administrative spending by adopting forward thinking measures like electronic records; allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices just like the VA does, allowing the re-importation of prescription drugs, and actively promote accountable care organizations that integrates coordinate health care services.

Republicans and Democrats must work together to implement common sense solutions to save the program.

However, what we must not do is dismantle the system altogether, while keeping the same name and pretend that's Medicare. Ending Medicare is not something to be proud of.

Paul Ryan's looks are often compared to an actor's, and that's no accident: He's being groomed for the role of a lifetime. When Mitt Romney accidentally introduced Ryan as "the next President" he may have been displaying the same predilection for accidental honesty - for truth-telling as political gaffe - that he showed when he praised Israel's socialized health system.

And Romney may be right. The most likeable and electable extremist in the country just became the GOP's 2016 front-runner. That's no accident either.

All the signs suggest that the economy will struggle for years unless progressive steps are taken. Worse, another steep decline into recession or depression could occur at any time. If Obama's re-elected and we're still suffering in 2016, as now seems likely, our "electable extremist" will be in the perfect position to become the next President.

Heads we win, says Corporate America, and tails you lose.

The Long Game

Even that doesn't tell the whole story. The Ryan choice reflects something much bigger than an election or two. Corporate America and those who serve it have been playing a Long Game for political power, displaying formidable qualities yet to be seen in its electoral opponents: a clearly-articulated vision, concrete goals, and the ability to plan and execute long-range strategies.

Under their ideal of Corporate Statism, the President is no longer "the Decider." He or she increasingly serves as Corporate America's employee, a hireling who serves as its sales rep, its celebrity spokesperson, as a flesh-and-blood avatar for faceless financial power.

Who's better suited for that job than Paul Ryan?

The game plan was laid out in the infamous Lewis Powell memo of 1970, which encouraged corporations to take control of all major US institutions. And their game was already well underway when Powell sketched his strategy on the chalkboard.

Far from being a blunder, the Ryan nomination can be seen as the next step in a decades-long plan to capture this country's political institutions for the ideology of radical corporate statism. The left would be wise to stop celebrating it and start coming up with a Long Game of its own.

We Don't Do Windows

The Corporate Right's leadership may have already concluded that this year's Presidential election is likely unwinnable. Ryan then becomes the perfect choice for VP: With one move, the nation's most genuinely radical national politician became the leading contender for the 2016 nomination. Ryan will turn out the GOP base and give it a lift in down-ticket races. And most importantly, a far-right radical has been given four months to preach an extreme vision of America on a national platform.

And let's not forget: If the unexpected happens and the GOP ticket wins, this radical will also be a heartbeat away from the Presidency.

If Uriah Heep were the leading man on a daytime soap opera, he'd be Paul Ryan. Ryan's half-suave, half-goofy style puts an avuncular smiley-face on the corporatists' brutal ideology. He'll move the "Overton window" of political acceptability even further to the Right every time he appears on television. And he'll appear on television a lot. Let's face it, liberals: The camera loves those eyes.

Until this weekend, nobody in the Presidential race was articulating a clear political vision. But Paul Ryan will.

Ryan's is an extreme Randian vision of the economic landscape as painted by Hieronymus Bosch, where corporate colossuses strive above a ragged population struggling to survive in their shadows. Why is this ideology frightening, if it's so unpopular and dystopic? To paraphrase John Goodman in The Big Lebowski: Say what you like about the tenets of corporate statism, Dude, but at least it's an ethos.

The Corporate State

The phrase "corporate statism" describe the GOP's new ideology far better than "conservatism" does. The corporate statists don't share traditional conservatism's abhorrence of fiscal deficits, for example, despite all their rhetoric to the contrary.

In fact, the Ryan budget would actually increase the deficit from its current $10 trillion to $22 trillion over a ten-year period, so that by 2022 the nation would be paying more in interest payments than it would in Medicare payments. That's much higher than the deficits projected under President Obama's plan, which leads to reduced indebtedness over time.

The only genuine conservative in this year's race, at least where government deficits are concerned, is Barack Obama.

The Rand/Ryan/Romney ideology is "corporate statist" because it places the institutions of government at the disposal of, and in the service of, a few dozen mega-corporations. We saw the corporate-statist agenda in action when Rep. Spencer Bachus, in another "truth as gaffe" moment, told Wall Street executives that "Washington exists to serve the banks."

We've also seen the corporate-statist agenda in massive government giveaways to corporations through bank bailouts. We've seen it in the movement to privatize government functions, a policy failure that has helped some executives get very, very rich. We've seen it in the push to "private Social Security accounts." And we''re seeing it in the soaring expenditures for military purchasing in the supposedly "cost-cutting" Ryan/Romney GOP budget.

Who will promote that radical agenda this year? Paul Ryan will.

The Great Plundering

The endgame for the Corporate State is ever-increasing wealth transfer from the vast majority to a tiny minority. That happens on the aggregate level through deregulation and political corruption, and on the individual level through a series of increasingly greater tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy. That costs money, of course, so this agenda subsidized through a program of economic warfare on most Americans that includes:

• Deep cuts in government services for lower-income people;
• Deep cuts in some social insurance programs (Social Security) and the outright elimination of others (Medicare) for the middle class;
• An immediate tax increase for 95 percent of Americans; and,
• Even more drastic longer-term tax increases for most Americans through the elimination of "tax expenditures" - that is, deductions for home mortgage interest, employer health coverage, and child care.

Even those payments on the national debt, which would soar under the Ryan plan, are a form of wealth transfer. They'll use taxpayers' money to increase profits for Wall Street banks.

The Vision

The corporate-statist movement has a vision, all right. It's the vision of a nation where most people live in financial uncertainty and deprivation, a harsh environment which accomplishes two goals for corporatists: It adds to the pool of low-cost employees who will tolerate degrading working conditions, and it ensures that the public will be too frightened to mount any real resistance to corporate abuse.

Why do you think more underwater homeowners haven't walked away from their mortgages? They know that low credit scores would deprive them of the ability to borrow, which they may desperately need to make ends meet, and that it could even render them unemployable. That's just a small taste of what life wil be like under Corporate Statism. If people are too frightened to refuse to pay usurious interest on deceptively obtained loans, they'll certainly be too frightened to Occupy the Corporate State.

And that's the plan.

Yes, the Corporate Right has a vision. It's the vision of a classically oligarchical nation controlled by a tiny and extremely wealthy ruling class. It's a vision of deregulated corporations who have the unrestrained freedom to endanger lives, jeopardize the global economy, and despoil the environment. It's a vision of unfettered corporate control over our politics, our media, and even our private lives.

Say what you will about these tenets, dudes and dudettes, but at least it's an ethos.

Story Time

Is there a counter-ethos?

Not so far. It was encouraging to hear our centrist-leaning President accurately characterize Ryan's approach as "social Darwinism," but his message and his deeds continue to blend old-school conservatism with rhetorical populism. Even erstwhile liberal firebrand Nancy Pelosi says she'd vote for the right-leaning, anti-government Simpson Bowles plan in a heartbeat.

The Democrats will be tempted to use Ryan as an excuse to stick to their destructive (and self-destructive) strategy of articulating a DC-centric version of "centrism" that's far to the right of American public opinion. That would weaken turnout and enthusiasm among their base, without impressing very many undecideds.

Democrats aren't going to win against an anti-Social Security, anti-Medicare agenda with nuanced arguments about cutting them a little less, or a little differently, than their opponents would. Sure, Obama may eke out a Presidential victory, but the Democratic message will have received another damaging blow. And the Corporate Right's message will have validated by a wave of dithering, hair-splitting, "we're the real Simpson Bowles'" deficit reduction rhetoric from the Dems.

A coherent story is usually much more persuasive than an incoherent story one - even if it happens to be insane.

That's never more true than in hard times like these. As many as 24 million voters live in homes with "underwater" mortgages. Fifteen million of them are un- or under-employed. Most of them are feeling the agony of long-term wage stagnation, cuts to vital government services, and an economy that's in permanent recession.

If they only hear one clear story to explain what's going on, a clear story is the story they'll remember. Who'll tell a clear story this year? One thing's for sure: Paul Ryan will.

Double Vision

Randian social theory, like conservative economic theory, has been conclusively disproved by events. What's more, polls show that most Americans support government's role in their daily lives - in Medicare and Social Security, in police and firefighting efforts, in education, and in the construction and maintenance of our national infrastructure.

But if the Democrats don't articulate a clear vision of their own, this campaign season will shift public consciousness further to the right. The idea of a nation "of the people, by the people, and for the people" will recede even further into the dim recesses of public memory. "President Ryan" - or another smiling cipher - will be that much closer to attaining power on behalf of his or her sponsors. And Corporate America's frightening plan to own our future and everyone in it will be that much closer to becoming reality.

To anyone with a basic grasp of policy and numbers, Paul Ryan's charts and graphs are empty and meaningless. He's a salesman, not a leader. He "didn't build that" - but he can sell it. He can't write the story, but he can tell it. And, however crazy it may sound to some of us, the Corporate Right does have a story to tell.

If the Democrats don't, do it, then somebody who opposes the Corporate Right needs to articulate a vision for the future - and then fight for that vision with everything they've got. Because one thing's for certain:

Paul Ryan will.

* Tearful homecoming in Wisconsin

* Romney shows flash of anger at Obama

* Ryan's stance on Medicare could hurt vote among seniors

By Steve Holland and Sam Youngman

WAUKESHA, Wisc., Aug 12 (Reuters) - Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney took vice presidential running mate Paul Ryan home to a tearful welcome in Wisconsin on Sunday in a celebratory event that produced a flash of anger from Romney over what he considers dishonest campaigning by President Barack Obama.

Ryan, a Wisconsin congressman elevated to Romney's No. 2 on Saturday, wiped away tears and choked up as he and Romney made a dramatic entrance on stage in front of a crowd of around 8,000 to the theme song of the movie, "Air Force One."

Clearly reveling in the moment as the native son come home, Ryan told them: "I'm a Wisconsinite through and through."

"My veins run with cheese, bratwurst, a little Spotted Cow ... and some Millers," he said to laughter. "I like to hunt here, I like to fish here, to snowmobile here. I even think ice fishing is interesting."

The Nov. 6 election is more than two months away, but Sunday's rally had the intensity of a typical late-October campaign event. It showed how Romney's selection of the Wisconsin congressman as his running mate has injected new energy into a campaign that had struggled to move beyond Democrats' efforts to cast Romney as a wealthy former private equity executive who cannot relate to middle-class Americans.

Romney hopes the enthusiasm produced by the No. 2 pick will generate a spark that will help him erase a lead Obama has produced in recent polls of voters.

"What a homecoming for a terrific guy," Romney told the Waukesha crowd. "I guess you think I made the right decision, the right choice? I know I did."

When a heckler tried to disrupt the event, Romney unleashed frustrations at the Obama campaign over a television ad produced by a pro-Obama group that all but suggested Romney shared some of the blame for the death of the wife of a steelworker, who lost his job and health insurance when Romney's Bain Capital bought the company.

The ad has been roundly condemned by independent fact-checkers, but the Obama campaign has not called for the ad to be pulled. While the Romney campaign has engaged in negative tactics as well, his aides felt the ad crossed a line.

"There's no question but if you follow the campaign of Barack Obama, he's going to do everything in his power to make this the lowest, meanest negative campaign in history. We're not going to let that happen. This is going to be a campaign about ideas about the future of America," Romney said angrily.

"Mr. President, take your campaign out of the gutter," he said. "Let's talk about the real issues that America faces."

Romney, 65, seemed relieved to have a sidekick to end what he has called the "two against one" dynamic of the race, with Obama and Vice President Joe Biden on one side and Romney on the other.

"It's a far more compelling dynamic than just being out there on my own," Romney told reporters late Saturday.

But it also was evident that Romney's selection of Ryan - who is known for his sweeping budget plan to reduce government spending and debt by trimming taxes and revamping Medicare and other social programs - is going to raise a series of hurdles for his campaign as it sprints toward Election Day.

In choosing Ryan, Romney is all but attaching himself to Ryan's controversial budget plan, which has been blasted by Democrats who say it would dismantle popular social programs that help the elderly and the poor.

Ryan's selection also suggested that Romney is tackling a prickly task during an intense, nasty and likely close race for the White House. He is asking Americans to consider tough questions about the future of Medicare, the government-backed health insurance program for the elderly, and a range of other government programs.

During an interview that Romney and Ryan gave to CBS's Bob Schieffer on "60 Minutes" on Sunday, Ryan responded to criticism of his Medicare plan by noting that it would apply only to those younger than 55.

"My mom is a Medicare senior in Florida," Ryan said. "Our point is, we need to preserve their benefits, because government made promises to them that they've organized their retirements around. In order to make sure we can do that, you must reform it for those of us who are younger. And we think these reforms are good reforms."

Romney and Ryan will now head off in different directions, Romney to resume bus tour in Florida and Ryan goes to Iowa on Monday.


SEEKING A NATIONAL DEBATE?

In previous elections, candidates who have started a not-so-popular conversation with American voters have run into problems.

In 1984, for example, Democrat Walter Mondale emphasized the need for higher taxes and was swamped at the ballot box as voters re-elected Republican Ronald Reagan.

If Romney's campaign wants to foster a national debate over social programs and government entitlements, the big challenge will be doing so under the white-hot glow of the final weeks of a presidential campaign that so far has been defined by sound-bite messaging and out-of-context attacks by both sides.

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus cast Romney's campaign as the one being honest with Americans about the nation's fiscal future and said Obama's team is more interested in attacking Romney.

Selecting Ryan shows that Romney "has the leadership and courage to present to the American people a real contrast and a real debate that the American people deserve," Priebus said on NBC's "Meet the Press."

Even so, Romney's campaign stressed that the presumptive Republican nominee would propose his own fiscal plan, suggesting it did not want the former Massachusetts governor to be tied to everything in Ryan's budget.

"The thing you have to remember about these campaigns is that Governor Romney is at the top of the ticket, and that Governor Romney's vision for the country is something that congressman Ryan supports," Romney spokesman Kevin Madden said.


DEMOCRATS TAKE AIM

Democrats' efforts to cast Ryan - and, by extension, Romney - as a threat to Medicare could be key in the election.

Ryan's plan calls for an end to the guaranteed benefit in Medicare and replaces it with a system that would give vouchers to recipients to pay for health insurance.

The risk in such a plan is that if healthcare costs rise faster than the value of the vouchers, seniors would have to pay the difference.

Obama's senior campaign adviser David Axelrod said on "Meet the Press" that the Medicare changes supported by Ryan would send the healthcare program, which polls indicate most Americans do not want changed, into a "death spiral."

Independent groups that typically support Democrats have been more dramatic in their criticism.

Romney rejected the notion that Ryan's plan would kill Medicare.

Ryan "has a plan ... to make sure we can save Medicare," Romney said. "And guess what, he's one of two sponsors - and guess what, the other is a leading Democrat," a reference to Oregon Senator Ron Wyden.

Wyden, however, disagreed with Romney's characterization of his work on the Medicare issue, saying that he has voted against Medicare changes proposed in Ryan's budget.

Wyden told The Huffington Post that he merely had worked on a "policy paper" with Ryan that was designed to "start a conversation about how Democrats and Republicans might work together to uphold the Medicare guarantee."

The man charged with electing Democrats to the House of Representatives boasted on Saturday that the party had higher hopes for taking back the majority now that Mitt Romney had tapped Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) as his vice presidential candidate.

"Mitt Romney this morning may have just become the most recent DCCC majority maker," said Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Steve Israel in an interview with The Huffington Post. "It's no question, we have been slogging uphill to get the majority. We needed a national breeze at our backs, and Mitt Romney may have given us that breeze this morning."

Israel isn't the only Democrat waxing optimistic about the benefits the party stands to gain from Romney's choice of Ryan. The Wisconsin Republican is best known for his budget proposal, which includes steep cuts to federal spending and aggressive entitlement reforms, such as turning Medicaid into a block grant program and Medicare into a voucher-like system. Polling has shown that these prescriptions aren't all that popular.

Unlike other Democrats, however, Israel has first-hand experience in seeing how the Ryan budget can play in an election. He helped engineer victories for Rep. Kathy Hochul in upstate New York and for Rep. Ron Barber in Arizona, both of which hinged largely on using the Medicare proposal to the Democrats' advantage. "We know it works," he said, "and it works well."

Now, he predicted, the party could apply the same tactic nationwide.

"The Ryan budget is a debate we know we win, and Mitt Romney has just nationalized the debate," he said. "We have needed a nationalized election on priorities, and we now have a clear contrast between two national brands."

It's difficult to assess just how much the selection of Ryan as VP will turn the election into a referendum on his budget. Romney, after all, moved swiftly to distance himself from the proposals, releasing talking points that said he would craft his own approach to tricky issues like entitlement reform. But even before the VP selection, Democrats were working hard to tie him to the Ryan plan.

"The choice of the plan's author as a running mate makes that task seemingly much easier," Israel said. He said he believes Democrats chances of taking back the house are much improved. "It is still an uphill battle, but we now have a wind at our backs. And I will say this, if we win the majority and the pundits look back at where it turned, I think they are going to look at August 11, with this announcement."

John Fund, National Review
Liberal pundits are already fanning out in force to attack and discredit Paul Ryan. Michael Tomasky, who recently wrote a Newsweek cover story calling Mitt Romney a “wimp,” has now decided that Romney’s bold move is “a terrible choice” because Ryan has proven himself to be an extremist on budget issues.No doubt there are many Democrats rubbing their hands in glee in contemplation of reviving some version of the ad that featured an actor playing Paul Ryan pushing a grandmother in a wheelchair off a cliff. But the smarter ones are...

Stephen Hayes & Bill Kristol, Weekly Standard
"One of the things that the White House is also focusing on is dropping everything that they have on the Paul Ryan budget plan - the Democrats, the media, the White House - all piling up on the Ryan budget plan," Sykes said to Romney. "You have embraced that plan. You've endorsed that plan. The Democrats think that the Republicans have handed them a weapon because they're now going to say that you conservative Republicans, you want to balance the budget on the backs of the frail, the elderly and the poor. How will you respond to that?"Romney answered, first, by...

WASHINGTON-- The Franciscan Action Network (FAN), a Catholic faith-based advocacy and civic engagement organization, is strongly criticizing Mitt Romney's recent ads and rhetoric regarding welfare programs and welfare recipients, urging him to spend some time in low-income communities.

"Our Christian tradition teaches that we are to treat the poor with dignity and to prioritize the poor in our policies as a society," the organization said in a press release on Thursday. "At a time when millions are struggling financially, it is degrading to talk about the "dependency" of people hurting in this economy, as Gov. Romney did recently."

Rhett Engelking, a secular Franciscan in Milwaukee and member of FAN, has even personally invited Romney to visit with the low-income people he assists. “Political leaders would not talk about the poor in demeaning ways or cut job training programs if they spent more time with the people they are affecting with their policies," he said.

While faith-based anti-poverty and charity organizations have often criticized candidates and lawmakers for a perceived unwillingness to highlight and tackle issues affecting the very poor, FAN claims Romney's rhetoric goes a step further, unfairly using welfare recipients as political props.

FAN spokesman Lonnie Ellis told The Huffington Post that what Romney is doing is "worse than ignoring" poor people. He said Romney is essentially criticizing President Barack Obama for helping out low-income individuals. "It's saying look, 'President Obama is actually supporting poor people too much, or he's just giving a free ride to poor people,'" Ellis said. "So it's actually using poor people in a really bad way."

FAN's criticism, however, goes beyond the Romney campaign's rhetoric on welfare by condemning cuts to Pell Grants, Medicaid and Head Start programs put forth in the budget proposed by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and supported by Romney.

“With the political conversation now on ensuring that low-income people are working, the most blatant affront is that the Romney-Ryan Budget actually cuts job training programs for low-income people,” FAN Executive Director Patrick Carolan said in a statement.

The Romney campaign could not immediately be reached for comment.

While many Catholic groups have generally been supportive of Romney and Republicans on social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage, FAN joins several other prominent Catholic organizations in their harsh criticism of the Romney campaign's stance on welfare and the Ryan budget.

As ThinkProgress reported, NETWORK, a Catholic social justice advocacy group, has supported the national "Nuns On A Bus" tour, which is aimed at highlighting the negative effects of Ryan's proposed cuts, and invited Romney to spend a day with Catholic nuns helping the poor in their communities.

In April, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops wrote a series of letters to congressional lawmakers criticizing the Ryan budget, saying that fair budget solutions "must require shared sacrifice by all, including raising adequate revenues, eliminating unnecessary military and other spending, and fairly addressing the long-term costs of health insurance and retirement programs."

"The House-passed budget resolution," the Bishops said in the letter, "fails to meet these moral criteria."

Ohio Democrats are criticizing the Republican nominee for the state's U.S. Senate seat over what they call a misleading annual report sent out by his state office.

The state Democratic Party said that state Treasurer Josh Mandel is trying to boost his performance by including a full list of his state duties, including his role as chairman of the state Board of Deposit, in the Fiscal Year 2012 Annual Report issued by the treasurer's office. Mandel came under fire from Democrats earlier this year for missing 14 months of Board of Deposit meetings and delegating the chairman's role to a top aide. Mandel is locked in a competitive Senate race with Sen. Sherrod Brown (D).

"In this desperate attempt to rebrand their absentee boss, it appears the treasurer's office forgot to scrub chairing the billion-dollar Board of Deposit, which Josh blew off for fourteen months straight, from a ridiculous list of official duties Mandel's supposed to fulfill that they embarrassingly attempted to brag about. Oops," Ohio Democratic Party spokesman Andrew Zucker told HuffPost in an email. "Ohioans need look no further than Josh Mandel's latest misleading report, which embarrassingly boasts that under Ohio law he's supposed to chair the billion-dollar investment meetings he blew off for more than a year for proof that he's just another politician who can't be trusted."

Mandel also outlines his roles as the state's chief banker and a series of other boards he sits on including the Agricultural Financing Commission, and the Petroleum Underground Storage Tank Release Compensation Board.

The report issued by the treasurer's office touts Mandel's achievements including saving state funds through new investment and banking practices and cuts to the budget. He highlights an almost $1 million savings to his office budget, including the cancellation of temporary contracts, cuts to cell phone purchases and a moratorium on buying new office furniture. He also touts a growth in the state's rainy day fund and liquidity portfolio since taking office in January 2011.

"In the midst of the “Great Recession,” Ohioans expect their elected officials to practice fiscal responsibility and to safeguard and stretch their hard-earned tax dollars," Mandel writes in the report. "Our global, national and state economies are being adversely impacted by financial uncertainty and volatile markets. That is why in the State Treasurer’s office I remain committed to tightening the belt on government spending, conservatively managing state investments, and streamlining and consolidating bureaucracies to achieve efficiencies."

Seth Unger, the treasurer's office spokesman, could not be reached for immediate comment.

Everyone supports "open government." And it seems, these days, that most elected officials enjoy talking about how they support open government and transparency. But how many of us are really doing everything we can to do so?

Here are a couple of easy ways we are helping to bridge the gap between citizen and government in South Orange that I hope can serve as perhaps a starting point for others looking to do the same -- as well as for citizens who want to push their local officials to embrace the benefits of new technology.

But before I get started, it's important to note that these ideas (and plenty more) for the most part save taxpayer money and make government more transparent at the same time. Using the right technological platforms, you don't need to sacrifice lots of money to be more transparent, and no longer do governments have to sacrifice transparency to save money.

Open Budget data: In South Orange this year, for the first time (and one of the only municipalities to even do so), we released our $32 million municipal budget in a downloadable, editable Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, which allows the data to not only be understood and manipulated by anyone, but, being in a standard format, can be tied into other software or applications. We kept the formulas embedded in the spreadsheet so people could manipulate the numbers and see the impact on the total budget as well as each household. I joked at our 2012 State Of The Village that it allows someone to play Village administrator for a day, and it's really true.

We need to set a new standard for municipal government transparency in New Jersey -- helping citizens have access to easy budget info, and governments easy access to people's ideas and priorities about how their taxes are to be spent. Making a budget available online in one of a wide variety of interactive formats could allow residents to submit their own idea budgets, which helps us as elected officials know what a broader range people want (helping mitigate Squeaky Wheel Syndrome), and also helps educate people about our budget process and the tough decisions we are faced with.

Public Document Accessibility: Many municipalities are facing historic numbers of Open Public Records Act requests that can cost a lot of staff time and divert resources away from municipal or statutory responsibilities of Clerk's Offices (especially in the not infrequent cases of corporations/people taking advantage of the system). Instead of trying to implement some regulations that could inhibit the flow of public information to citrizens, there is another way to help mitigate the costs of this.

In South Orange, we have done this by having more than five years of meeting videos online, along with a searchable database of all of our minutes, agendas, resolutions, ordinances, proclamations (and more) that allows citizens very easy access to a wealth of public documents, which cuts down on the taxpayer expense of having staff find documents, and also provides information instantly to anyone interested. Anytime a special committee is created to research an issue, all of the minutes, reports and peripheral information is placed online. When we reviewed our Village Charter, hundreds of pages of documentation (that otherwise would surely have been OPRA'd numerous times) was put online to help anyone instantly understand the process. This is the bedrock to greater participation, and helps pave the way for rolling out even more participatory processes, like online voting platforms that allow the public to weigh in on any number of issues.

To further help with the OPRA requests, we are looking into implementing an online form that would help residents file records requests, help us manage it (and give us some analytics) and also make every prior request searchable and instantly available. So if someone files a duplicate request, it is filled instantly online (giving easier access and reducing taxpayer expenses). One such example of a form is written with open source software at Open Up NYC.

Partnerships. Helping bring some of the bigger open data initiatives from cities, around public transit schedules, water/utility usage, etc., to the smaller level that towns can adapt and adopt is key. There are a lot of open data initiatives happening around the country (StreetsBlog, San Francisco Data, Open 311, Code for America) and ensuring small towns are working with larger cities to share resources is key. I'm working with the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs and others to try and facilitate as many of those connections as possible -- there are so many great ideas out there, the best thing we can do is learn from each other.

Communication: Being an elected official, especially at the municipal level, and truly actively communicating is actually not as easy as it originally seems, and a number of legal grey areas make it difficult for elected officials who don't have a large staff to really use media the right way.

There is a legal wall you need to put up between public and political, and that means a lot of duplication. I have separate email lists, for example, from people who have emailed my municipal email account, versus emails collected politically or personally. I've found it incredibly helpful to use a piece of cloud-based software called NationBuilder, that inexpensively consolidates my website management, events, fundraising, blog, email blasts, voter file, social media and more into one online campaign dashboard. Using my campaign email list of a few thousand people, I'm able to stay in touch with residents and the larger community easily, help people understand the issues that are going on in town and spread the good news when we do have it. However, supporting these types of initiatives requires either self-funding (which as an unpaid, student loan debt ridden elected official, I simply cannot do) or constantly raising money. Fortunately, some of these tools are much more inexpensive now, and this reduced cost means that its easier than ever to build a semi-professional communication platform, even if its just you and a few volunteers.

And staying active on social media is one of the easiest (and cheapest) things you can do as an elected official, though yet again, is disincentiviezd because of the unclear legal issues. Pretty much anything regulating social media for public officials is based off evolving case law, not clear and defined statutory guidelines. But for example, during the storms last year, I had hundreds of interactions with residents looking for information, giving me information and discussing, over both Facebook and Twitter. Although this wasn't through an official village social media platform, I can use my personal Facebook and Twitter to connect with people quickly, but have to take precautions as well -- for example, redirecting all people who ask questions about municipal business through private message to my municipal email account.

Sending out short video updates over social media and email (for example: State of Village Video and my latest video update) and writing up thorough but approachable summaries of larger issues has garnered a lot of positive feedback from people who feel as though they have more information about what's happening than they ever have. And to a quote often attributed to Thomas Jefferson: "An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people."

I think part of the takeaway here is that not everything constructive to more transparent government has to literally happen through the government bureaucracy, but rather it's up to us, as public officials to work within the confines of the system we are part of, and figure out the best way to do it for the people we serve.

Municipalities range in size and the amount of resources they can allocate to working on an issue like this, and even range on their interest to do so. However, if we can bring smaller towns together, sometimes with the support of larger cities, make available the failure and success stories of initiatives we've tried, and show those officials less enthusiastic about these innovations that the people support it, we can lower the barrier of entry into it and do our part in helping to truly turn Government into Government 2.0.

Ezra Klein, Bloomberg
Last week, I wrote about the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center’s effort to run the numbers on Mitt Romney’s base-broadening, rate-lowering tax reform plan. The numbers, as you may have guessed, didn’t add up. And that’s not just a problem for Romney. It’s a problem for anyone committed to the idea of tax reform.As polarized as Washington is over tax and budget issues, a base-broadening, rate-lowering tax-code overhaul has become the one policy every wonk in town can agree on.

Jared Bernstein, Huffington Post
The New Yorker's Ryan Lizza provides a profile of Rep. Paul Ryan, with a rich discussion of his vision for limited government.It's a good read, but it left me thinking about what it is that troubles me most about Rep. Ryan, an earnest guy who's come a long way and influenced a lot of people at a relatively young age. The problem is his numbers don't add up. And that's a particularly big problem for a celebrated budget wonk.

Those decrying the adverse economic consequences of looming budget cuts are often the very same people who claim that the 2009 fiscal stimulus didn't add jobs.

For example, Senators John McCain (R-AZ), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) have held a series of public meetings this week designed to highlight what they call "the profound negative consequences" of the defense budget cuts scheduled to take place next January. These automatic cuts will occur because the Congressional Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction failed to reach an agreement to reduce the deficit by an additional $1.2 trillion. The spending cuts will harm the economy and "put one million jobs at risk," the senators say.

In contrast, Senator McCain has contended that the stimulus "didn't work. It added to our debt and deficit, and we lost jobs." Senator Graham claims, "The Obama stimulus has pretty much been a bust. Very few benefits or jobs created."

Others have been equally inconsistent. But both arguments can't be true. If cutting government spending in a time of economic slack reduces employment, then increasing government spending must increase employment. That's why an overwhelming majority of leading economists surveyed by the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business agreed that the stimulus reduced the unemployment rate.

WASHINGTON -- Escalating a small drama that's becoming increasingly politicized, House Republicans have asked the Labor Department to turn over documents related to the agency's recommendation that defense contractors refrain from issuing layoff notices due to looming defense budget cuts ahead of the fall elections.

The job losses, expected due to sequestration, could become a campaign issue for President Barack Obama and other politicians on both sides of the aisle, as layoff notices could go out to workers shortly before voters head to the polls in November.

As AOL Defense has reported, earlier this week the Labor Department sent out guidance to contractors saying the layoff notices wouldn't need to go out 60 days ahead of sequestration, as many expected they would under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act. Republicans, such as House Armed Services Committee Chairman Rep. Buck McKeon (R-Calif.), claimed the guidance was "politically motivated" and legally dubious, suggesting the White House simply wanted to avoid a politically damaging situation in an election that's all about jobs.

On Thursday, House Education and Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline (R-Minn.) sent a letter to Labor Secretary Hilda Solis asking that the agency turn over all of its internal correspondence related to its guidance to contractors on the WARN Act.

"The recent 'guidance' issued by the Obama administration is a political document that underscores the legal uncertainty facing employers and leaves countless workers in the dark about whether they will lose their jobs," Kline said in a statement. "The president can end the debate over the WARN Act right now by providing real transparency to the sequestration process and working with Congress on responsible reforms that will help fix the nation’s debt crisis."

In its guidance, the Labor Department essentially said that the layoff notices wouldn’t need to be issued since it isn't clear whether sequestration will actually happen. Lawmakers, in theory, still have time to avoid the sequestration cuts if they can reach a compromise.

The layoffs would be the result of the debt deal hammered out between the White House and Congress last year. The campaign for GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney has tried to make an issue out of the looming defense layoffs, particularly in Virginia, a crucial swing state with a large number of defense jobs.

By Anna Meier and Suzanne Dershowitz

Sens. John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Kelly Ayotte hit the road this week in Florida, New Hampshire, Virginia and North Carolina to preach against looming Pentagon spending cuts. Call it the "Misinformation Road Show" brought to you by defense industry contractors.

The trio of Republican senators are throwing out words like "devastating" and "draconian" to describe the potential across-the-board spending cuts, known as "sequestration." Graham even warned people in Fayetteville that "Y'all are about to get screwed if this thing happens."

Ah, nothing like a little fear and loathing to rile up swing state voters. Too bad, their message mostly parrots the talking points of the major defense industry contractors.

What McCain, Graham and Ayotte aren't mentioning are the record earnings by large Pentagon contractors, the exorbitant executive salaries paid at these firms, the billions of dollars lost to waste and mismanagement and the fact that several politically-diverse national security experts say even if the deepest Pentagon cuts occur (and that scenario is unlikely) it will have a negligible effect on industry profits.

The threats of mass layoffs are simply political scare tactics by an industry that can afford to spend tens of millions of dollars on lobbying and campaign contributions while crying that the "sky is falling."

What's more, big Pentagon contractors have hundreds of billions of dollars in backlogged orders that will maintain their revenue streams and keep their employees busy delivering goods and services for years to come.

If you want the real story, see this detailed briefing paper that the Project On Government Oversight and its allies put together that takes on the industry talking points.

The American people seem to disagree with Pentagon contractor lobbyists--they're ready to rein in runaway Pentagon spending. According to a May 2012 study by the Stimson Center, 62 percent of Americans support reductions in the defense budget.

It's a view shared by experts as well.

"There is plenty of fat to cut before laying off workers is even considered," said Ben Freeman, a national security investigator at POGO. "POGO and many other groups on both sides of the political spectrum have identified hundreds of billions of dollars in wasteful spending at the Pentagon."

But even if sequestration were implemented in full, the Pentagon's budget would only drop to about $472 billion, or the same amount spent in FY 2007, adjusted for inflation.

As our briefing paper points out, the talking points that McCain, Graham and Ayotte will cover are backed by industry fronts, such as Second to None, which is funded by the Aerospace Industries Association. The Coalition for the Common Defense has also recently published over 200 pages on how the defense cuts will affect jobs and small businesses state by state. This publication is a product of the Center for Security Policy, a neoconservative think tank affiliated with executives and lobbyists from across the spectrum of top U.S. weapons manufacturers.

If you can get into one of these propaganda sessions, more of which will likely pop up in a town near you sometime before the election, be sure to ask why the defense industry is threatening to cut workers when they have so much money to pay their executives.

If Pentagon contractors were actually feeling economic pressure, they could certainly trim excesses at the top before letting go thousands of rank-and-file employees. Pentagon contractors' top executives enjoy compensation packages on par with Wall Street CEOs. The CEOs of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, United Technologies, and Northrup Grumman all made between $22 and $27.6 million in total annual compensation for 2011, and David Cote of Honeywell brought home a whopping $37.8 million.

Don't buy what the defense industry and their surrogates are trying to sell you. The sky isn't falling: There's plenty of wasteful spending that can be trimmed from the Pentagon budget that would in fact make us more secure in our economy and our defense.

Anna Meier is a communications associate and Suzanne Dershowitz is a policy fellow for the Project On Government Oversight.

Paul Krugman, New York Times
For years, allegedly serious people have been issuing dire warnings about the consequences of large budget deficits — deficits that are overwhelmingly the result of our ongoing economic crisis. In May 2009, Niall Ferguson of Harvard declared that the “tidal wave of debt issuance” would cause U.S. interest rates to soar. In March 2011, Erskine Bowles, the co-chairman of President Obama’s ill-fated deficit commission, warned that unless action was taken on the deficit soon, “the markets will devastate us,” probably within two years....

Jonathan Chait, NY Magazine
President Obama’s effort to discredit Mitt Romney as a credible economic repairman has several elements: using his business career to cast doubts on his desire to help the middle class, tying him to the radical proposals of the Paul Ryan budget, and — something hinted at in Obama’s recent minute-long, talking-to-the-camera ad — portraying his plan as a mere reprisal of the failed George W. Bush approach.Last night, Brian Williams asked Romney to distinguish his approach to economic growth from Bush’s. The answer was a mere recapitulation of...

Dana Milbank, WaPo
There have been many mendacious moments in this presidential campaign, but it will be hard to top what Mitt Romney told the Veterans of Foreign Wars conference this week.President Obama is seeking "an arbitrary, across-the-board budget reduction that would saddle the military with $1 trillion in cuts," the Republican said. "Strategy is not driving the president's massive defense cuts. In fact, his own secretary of defense warned that these reductions would be devastating, and he's right. ."‰."‰. This is no time for the president's...

Robert Samuelson, Washington Post
WASHINGTON -- It's no secret that the states are in as much budget trouble as the federal government. Doubters should read a new report from a group headed by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker and former New York Lt. Gov. Richard Ravitch. By this account, states face four insistent forces: pension underfunding of at least $1 trillion; rapidly rising Medicaid spending; possible cuts in federal aid that provides $1 in $3 of state spending; and weak growth of tax revenues that, in 2011, remained 7 percent below their pre-recession peak.What looms are higher state taxes and...

A vigorous debate about public issues is usually a healthy thing. The clash of opposing views and opinions can stimulate the public's interest and thought, and provide substance -- meat -- for people to chew on and digest. Expressing opinions is one of the most sacred hallmarks of American life. However, the audience usually has to trust in the honesty of the person expressing the opinion to ensure it bears some relation to the truth. Unfortunately, in political debate for most of the last 20 years, the truth has been missing in action more and more frequently. Today, the truth is seldom allowed to get in the way of creating a great sound bite or persuasive argument.

For example, the Heritage Foundation has disseminated an op-ed claiming that "Obama's tax plan would definitely hurt job creators." It didn't allow truth to be an impediment in opposing the expiration of the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts for personal income above $250,000 per year. In trying to make a case that allowing Bush Administration tax cuts to expire for the highest 3 percent of income in the country will stifle the economy by raising taxes on "job creators," the Heritage Foundation ignored facts and relied instead on tired and completely discredited talking points.

Let's sprinkle the discussion with just a few factual points:

• President George W. Bush's original rationale for cutting tax rates in 2001 was to get rid of a sizable budget surplus at the end of the Clinton Administration. Remember?
• President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Republican Congressional leaders swore up and down that tax cuts would pay for themselves, even though such claims were disputed by the U.S. Treasury Department and Congressional Budget Office.
• Pushed into law through the same budget reconciliation process used to pass President Obama's Affordable Care Act in 2009, the tax cuts were programmed by Congressional Republicans to expire in ten years to limit their ultimate price tag. So, how does the scheduled expiration of Republican tax cuts now become an Obama tax increase?
• The tax cuts were zealously guarded by Congressional Republicans at the same time they were passing into law the $1.2 trillion Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit in 2002 and funding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan into 2009, with a price tag of $2.3-2.7 trillion to date, without including any of those costs in annual budgeting. Ever wonder where $1.6 trillion of our national debt came from?
• The Heritage Foundation cited an anonymous but "growing list of prominent economists and influencers" calling for the tax cuts to continue. Yet in 2003, 450 of our nation's leading economists, including ten Nobel Prize laureates, signed and published a statement predicting increased income inequality, growing budget deficits and a decrease in the U.S. government's ability to fund essential services or promote economic growth if the tax cuts were enacted. Looks like they might have known what they were talking about.
• During eight years of the Bush Administration -- with its tax cuts -- job growth was 1 percent, the lowest since 1945. If lower taxes spur job creation, what happened?
• It is absolutely true that in past years the majority of Americans jobs were created in small businesses. However, it's also true that the likelihood of a small business adding jobs is due, more than anything else, to increased customer demand for its products or services, not the owner's individual tax rate.
• The Heritage Foundation claimed that restoring previous tax rates for income over $250,000 per year will affect nearly 30 percent of small business owners. But the foundation takes serious liberties with the definition of a small business. According to the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire on family income above $250,000 will affect 3 percent of America's small businesses.
• According to the Tax Policy Center, 1.5 percent of tax filers reporting business income are in the top two income tax brackets that President Obama wants to let expire at the end of this year.
• A Treasury Department report finds that only 2.5 percent of business owners taxed at the individual rate are in those top two tax brackets.

The idea that allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire -- as Republicans intended -- yet only on income above $250,000 per year will somehow stifle the economy or burden a large proportion of small business owners adds no substance to the public dialog. Instead of meat for a discussion, we're being served very thinly sliced baloney.

SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. -- San Bernardino declared a fiscal emergency Wednesday night, allowing the city to avoid a lengthy mediation process and head straight to federal bankruptcy court.

The declaration comes after the city announced last week that it would seek Chapter 9 protection, making it the third California city in recent weeks to make the rare move.

The City Council voted 5-2 to declare the emergency and file for bankruptcy protection amid a dire cash crunch that has officials worried San Bernardino can't meet payroll in August.

The vote was followed by another authorizing the city attorney to file for bankruptcy, but it was not clear when the planned filing would come.

Councilmen Chas Kelley and John Valdivia dissented on both votes.

Councilman Fred Shorett, who voted against bankruptcy last week, reversed his position Wednesday night and approved both moves.

"The horse is out of the barn – the whole world knows we're insolvent," Shorett said, according to the San Bernardino Sun. "I will be supporting going forward with Chapter 9 and fiscal emergency."

The vote could make the city of 210,000 people the third in California to seek bankruptcy protection since last month, following Stockton and Mammoth Lakes.

The city is facing a $45.8 million budget shortfall this year.

Last week's announcement of the bankruptcy plan has further stressed San Bernardino's finances by prompting a dozen employees to put in for retirement with hopes of cashing out accrued vacation and sick time, and it has spurred vendors to demand cash instead of credit, said Gwendolyn Waters, a spokeswoman for the city manager's office.

The debate over bankruptcy in San Bernardino has also raised questions about the city's financial management. Last week, City Attorney James Penman told the public that 13 of the last 16 budgets presented to the city council had been falsified, masking the city's deficit. The finance director, who is new to the job, said officials had borrowed cash from restricted funds to cover payments, and eventually ran out of money to pay the funds back.

Officials say the housing crisis – which walloped property and sales tax revenues – and the loss of state redevelopment funds took a toll on the city's budget. San Bernardino is located about 60 miles east of Los Angeles.

Recently, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act by defining the individual mandate as a tax. The ruling focused on a technical explanation of the individual mandate, with Chief Justice Roberts noting in his opinion: "... it is reasonable to construe what Congress has done as increasing taxes on those who have a certain amount of income, but choose to go without health insurance. Such legislation is within Congress's power to tax."

In essence, the Court endorsed the practice of lawmakers encouraging or discouraging individuals to change behaviors through the tax system. Whether you believe that this is good health care policy or not, most would agree that it's lousy tax policy. The propensity of our legislative branch to correct the social system through tax breaks and penalties has created a national tax law that is unfair, unnecessarily complicated, and economically inefficient.

The practice of using the tax code to advance social agendas and to change economic or societal behavior has skyrocketed over the last 25 years. Tax breaks for homeownership, retirement saving, having children, promoting energy conservation and more abound in the tax code. In fact, tax breaks rather than budgeted spending account for one-fourth to one-third of benefits and subsidies granted to the public, according to the Urban Institute's C. Eugene Steuerle. "Taxes powerfully influence how we all consume, work, save, and invest," he notes.

The result: a tax code that is millions of words long, with even longer regulations, and one that is an indecipherable patchwork quilt of provisions, breaks, and penalties designed to reward or punish behaviors that our "social scientists" deem important.

Currently the IRS is responsible for $2.5 trillion a year or an estimated 92 percent of all federal government receipts. Each year, Congress enacts legislation that results in numerous changes to the tax code, each requiring new paperwork, updated computer systems, revised audit procedures, and lengthy explanations for tax preparers and the public. And each year, the IRS also fails to collect an estimated $450 billion in individual and corporate income taxes, as well as employment, excise, and estate and gift taxes due, in part, to lack of funding and staffing to keep up with tax code changes.

And now with the Supreme Court's ruling, we are asking the IRS to add enforcement of an individual health insurance mandate to its portfolio. That means that, on top of its current responsibilities, the IRS will have to collect an assortment of fees that employers and companies would have to pay under the legislation, distribute federal subsidies to small businesses and low-income individuals, and enforce the insurance mandate. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the IRS would need an additional $5 billion to $10 billion in funding over 10 years to implement the bill's provisions.

The Obama Administration asked to increase the IRS's annual budget to $12.8 billion, in part to fund the necessary changes needed to administer the new program, but Republicans opposed to the bill were successful in cutting the agency's funds back to $11.8 billion in the budget approved earlier this year, with some Republicans even calling for the elimination of the agency altogether.

While the IRS is the federal agency that most Americans love to hate (conservative talk radio has already begun to blame it for the proposed expansion of power under health care reform), what is closer to reality is that the IRS has no interest in policing health care.

What is increasingly evident is the reach and magnitude of the power that Congress possesses in its taxing authority. It is our lawmakers and their apparently almost limitless ability to tax that have given us a tax code out of control -- subject to the social whims of the day and relied upon to cure societal ills that include a lack of health care coverage, addiction to tobacco, and more.

There have been books written about the IRS and its "Power to Destroy." But the IRS is merely the politicians' tool. Our lawmakers have the power to destroy, and their weapon of choice is their almost limitless ability to tax. In my world, Justice Roberts' decision exposes the scary dangers of the federal taxing power. It's time for Congress to rethink the practice of "social engineering" through the tax code and come to respect and restrain the awesome power to tax.

Christopher Bergin is President and Publisher of Tax Analysts and blogs for Tax.com. An expert on federal tax policy, he has written extensively on the subject and has worked in tax publishing for 30 years. This post was previously published in the Congress Blog of The Hill.

SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. -- The City Council in San Bernardino voted Tuesday night to seek Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection, making it the third California city in less than two weeks to make the rare move.

The Southern California city of about 210,000 people will also become the second largest in the nation ever to file for bankruptcy. Stockton, the Northern California city of nearly 300,000, became the biggest when it filed for Chapter 9 on June 28.

The City Council directed the city attorney to make the move during a meeting where administrators explained the dire fiscal circumstances and urged them to choose the bankruptcy option.

"We have an immediate cash flow issue," Interim City Manager Andrea Miller told Mayor Patrick Morris and the seven-member City Council, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Miller said the city is facing a budget shortfall of $45.8-million. It has already stopped paying some vendors, and may not be able to make payroll over the next three months.

Four council members voted for the authorization, two opposed it, and one abstained.

"This is probably the hardest decision this councilwoman will ever have to make in this chair," Councilwoman Wendy McCammack said, according to the San Bernardino Sun.

The councilman who abstained from voting, John Valdivia, said he did not trust the information presented at the meeting, and having only served since March believed he should not be held responsible for the money mess.

"The taxpayers of this city have been duped, hoodwinked and misguided for the past several years," Valdivia said, according to the Sun.

It was not immediately clear when the city planned to file.

Sixty miles east of Los Angeles, San Bernardino is in a region that soared economically during the housing boom, and suffered accordingly after the crash.

It joins a number of other cities and counties across the nation that have plunged into financial crisis as the recession made it tough to cover rising costs involving payroll, pensions, bondholders and vendors.

Before Stockton, a California city had not filed for bankruptcy since Vallejo in 2008.

Now, with Mammoth Lakes also voting to declare Chapter 9 on July 3, the state has seen three in two weeks.

Since Congress added Chapter 9 to the bankruptcy code in 1937 to allow municipalities to seek protection, about 640 government entities have filed.

Matt Welch, Reason
Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) may be too busy to pass a budget more than every 1,168 days or so, but he can always spare time for passing judgments about U.S. citizens who have the gall to open bank accounts in stable countries with sound currencies and a tradition (if eroding) of banking privacy."You either get a Swiss bank account to conceal what you're doing, or you believe the Swiss franc is stronger than the American dollar," Durbin put forth on Face the Nation this weekend, in part of a coordinated Democratic attack on Mitt Romney's overseas finances. 

It seems like every few months in Washington, a debate rages over the federal budget deficit or debt ceiling -- until some last-minute agreement emerges and the crisis appears to pass. But have these stopgap measures done anything to address the underlying issue of America's growing debt?

This is not just a government issue; the average American has also taken on an unmanageable level of debt. This addiction to debt contributed to the recession and financial crisis a few years ago, and the fundamental problem has yet to be addressed by the government or most individuals.

This MoneyRates.com infographic examines how this debt burden weighs on America like a monkey on its back.

See how America's debt has come to feel like a monkey on its back.

Courtesy of: MoneyRates.com

The original article can be found at Money-Rates.com: "Infographic: Attack of the Debt Monkey"