Which side of the bucket are you swimming in?

Does it even matter?

This has been a long, painful campaign season, and a lot of horse shit has been shoveled over these long months, interspersed with brief pearl-like moments of lucidity. I think the smartest thing anyone has said in this entire campaign was one single paragraph from Fred Thompson's Republican Convention speech...

Fred said "Now, our opponents tell us not to worry about their tax increases. They tell you they're not going to tax your family. No, they're just going to tax "businesses." So, unless you buy something from a business, like groceries or clothes or gasoline -- or unless you get a paycheck from a business, don't worry, it's not going to affect you! They say they're not going to take any water out of your side of the bucket, just the other side of the bucket!"

Which is about as lucid, and devastating an analysis of the Democratic approach towards economics as any sentence ever uttered in the annals of American political history.

Remember James Carville's famous quote from the 1992 campaign... "It's the economy, stupid"? I'm going to change it a little bit for the 2008 Democrats... my version is "The economy is a circle, stupid!"

Because what you do in this or that part of the economy affects every other part of our interdependent economy, not just in the United States but around the world. Listen to an Obama speech, any speech, just go to google and type in "Obama stump speech" and listen to the first one that pops up. You'll hear claim after claim and promise after promise that suggests that Obama, completely contrary to all historical evidence, believes that he can take action targeting specific parts of the economy without having any affect on any other part.

It just doesn't work that way.

And I'll give you an example using something dumb that a Republican did in this arena. Back in 2004 GW Bush was having some troubles in the rust belt. Specifically, Steel companies were facing stiff competition from abroad... foreign steelmakers were selling their goods in the U.S. at a discount in an effort to grab market share away from American companies. This severely threatened the profit margins of American steel manufacturers, as well as, perhaps more importantly, the salary levels of its union members. So ole George decided he would try to buy himself some votes by ordering price protection measures against foreign steel. Essentially what he did was artificially restrict the sale of foreign steel by insulating American steel manufacturers from competitive pricing. American steel manufacturers did not have to worry about shrinking profit margins, and American steel workers didn't have to worry about salary cuts.

What's not to love?

Well what Bush neglected to tell us was how keeping American steel prices artificially high would affect the rest of us. And it did... in ways to numerous to count.

But here's a few.

For one, everything made of steel remained artificially more expensive... so if market forces were trying to force car prices down, the fact that steel prices were pegged by our government at a certain, above-market level, kept them higher than they would otherwise be in a free market. So what's that mean? Maybe that fewer people bought cars because they were more expensive than they should have been... and if fewer people bought cars, then orders fell off at the manufacturers and auto workers had fewer shifts to fill and made less money, salesmen made less in commissions, and owners of car lots wound up carrying debt on their stocks of new cars longer than they had expected. In short, everyone besides the steels workers lost money. So in order to help one small sliver of the economy, Bush wound up hurting an even larger segment because he forgot (or ignored for convenience) the fact that all sectors of the economy are interdependent.

Or put more simply... The economy is a circle, stupid!

So when Obama tells you he's only going to raise taxes on rich people and rich corporations... ask youself if there's a chance that those tax increases might affect you, as a functioning member on an interdependent economy, in ways that perhaps even Obama himself doesn't mean for them too.

Even if you think corporations are inherently evil, indeed, especially if you believe that, then surely you don't think that those same corporations are going to sit still while the government tears into their profitability, do you? Do you think they're going to look at a 5 or 10% reduction in their profit margin and say "ah well, I guess we'll just have to eat it?"

Of course not. They're going to recover that loss by cutting costs.

Now maybe you'll get lucky and all it will mean is that your firm reduces its advertising budget... which of course, while it may not be a problem for you, might really suck for folks who make a living selling ad space on radio, TV, or print. But on the other hand, maybe they'll decide that you can get by with a slightly smaller benefits package next year.

Or maybe they'll decide they can do without you entirely.

Something to think about as your voting booth stylus hovers over "The Redistributor" next Tuesday.