We Need to Smash the Traitorous Tyranny of Ass-Backwards Ideologue Jeff Flake's Dead Ideas

In The Tyranny of Dead Ideas, published last year, Matt Miller laid out some of the ways we're constrained by ideas that are supposedly "common wisdom" among ass-backwards fools like Congressman Jeff Flake, an ideologue as wedded to his outmoded, outdated and totally wrong philosophy as Fidel Castro is to his.

Chapter 4 of the book relates to nutjob Jeff Flake's bête noire: taxes. It's titled with the Flakean fallacy, "Taxes Hurt the Economy (And They're Always Too High)." It begins with an explanation of Wagner's Law:

In 1883, Adolf Wagner, a combative forty-eight-year-old German economist, was puzzling over the way modern societies evolved. It had been two years since Otto von Bismarck had persuaded the emperor William I to send an extraordinary message to parliament that by decade's end would lead to the creation of the first modern system of social security. "The healing of social wrongs must be sought...by positively advancing the well-being of the workers," William wrote, with uncharacteristic empathy. "Those who are disabled from work by age and invalidity have a well-grounded claim to care from the state." Bismarck, as canny and brutal a statesman as existed in the nineteenth century, was hardly a softheaded liberal, but he came under vicious attack from the right for promoting such left-wing ideas. "Call it socialism or anything you like," Bismarck sputtered at his critics, who didn't grasp his plan to blunt the more radical agenda of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. "It is all the same to me."

The whole controversy got Wagner thinking. As people grew more affluent, he reasoned, they'd want more of what only government could provide—a strong military, public order, good schools, and assorted welfare benefits, services that private citizens would have trouble arranging for on their own. As a result of these desires, Wagner predicted, the development of an industrial economy would be accompanied by an increased share of public expenditure in gross national product. This simple insight, known as Wagner's Law to economists today, explains much that we've observed in the century or so since. Industrial nations have much higher taxes, measured as a percentage of their economy, than do poorer nations, and similarly they have higher spending on health care, schools, pensions, police, and so forth. As it turns out, no one sent the memo about Wagner's Law to the modern Republican Party. Which is roughly how a Reagan foot soldier named Bruce Bartlett came to be excommunicated from the conservative movement in 2003.

In the fall of that year, Bartlett was stumped. A former economic aide in the Reagan White House and a Treasury official under George H. W. Bush, Bartlett was a libertarian, small-government think tank scholar who had watched with amusement as the debate raged over adding a prescription drug benefit to Medicare. He presumed that President George W. Bush's support for the bill was insincere; the sausage the Republican Congress was cooking up would be such an unprecedented budget-buster, costing trillions in the decades ahead, that Bush had to be playing his part in a classic Washington minuet. Everyone knew the drill: the Senate and House would pass different versions of the measure that couldn't possibly be reconciled; the drug bill would thus die an unavoidable but "regretted" death; all sides would claim credit for having supported fresh aid for America's seniors; they'd return to fight the good fight another day. This had to be what was going on, Bartlett reckoned, because the White House was sending signals that it would sign any bill that passed. No president could be that fiscally reckless, Bartlett knew.

But President Bush, who wanted to be reelected in 2004, saw things differently. Bush knew in his political gut that Adolf Wagner was right, and that the moment had come to give struggling seniors the public help they sought for costly medicines. "I suddenly realized, this wasn't a game at all," Bartlett recalls. "They wanted to get this thing passed and they didn't care what was in it. It was like a cold slap in the face." Like many conservatives, Bartlett was outraged when the president signed the pricey new benefit into law. Then, like any good policy wonk, he sat down to think through what it all meant.

The government already faced about $40 trillion in unfunded liabilities for programs such as Social Security and Medicare. Bush and the Republican Party had just put their imprimatur on trillions more. Bartlett's conclusion was merely mathematical. "We cannot avoid a massive tax increase sometime in the near future," he recalls realizing. For a Republican to think such a thought was bad enough. Then Bartlett committed his real crime. He began laying out this thinking in public, first in his syndicated column and then in magazine articles. Bartlett argued that it was now clear beyond disputing that the Republican Party, despite its rhetoric, would never slow spending growth: after all, it had just enacted the biggest new health care entitlement since the 1960s, even as it balked at cutting a few billion dollars from the next trillion in planned Medicaid spending for the poor. Since tax increases would therefore be necessary before long to avoid untenable and debilitating deficits, the country needed to think about how to raise new revenue in ways that would be least distorting for the economy. To Bartlett, that meant it was time for an American version of the national sales tax favored by many European governments: a value added tax, or VAT.

Conservative Washington went berserk. Bartlett was summoned to a meeting at the Heritage Foundation, where several right-wing analysts castigated him for his heresy. Why are you endorsing tax increases, they demanded to know. To Bartlett the accusation was surreal. I'm not endorsing tax increases, he replied; I'm forecasting them. You know the facts as well as I do. "They simply refused to accept those realities," Bartlett recalls. "They refused to confront the numbers as they exist." Before long, Bartlett became persona non grata on the right, a man without a party. His banishment stood as a warning to others not to stray from the party line on taxes, no matter how detached from reality the orthodoxy became.

"I'm not in favor of higher taxes," Bartlett told me several years later, still smarting. "I'd be all in favor of slashing government so that it was not necessary. But I'm not stupid. I can see that we're not going to do that. We're not going to cut tens of trillions of dollars out of future spending from large constituencies of voters who are dependent upon these programs. It just isn't going to happen. And anybody who thinks it is, is living in a dream world."

The emphasis at the end is ours, and it means you, fanatic ideologue Jeff Flake. You don't believe in Social Security or Medicare or Medicaid. You think they're unconstitutional, "socialism," and you want to get rid of them. But you won't be able to even if there's a Republican president and an overwhelming majority of right-wing Republicans in Congress. (You can read the rest of Chapter 4 in Matt Miller's Tyranny of Dead Ideas here.) The answer's simple:

East Valley conservatives support Social Security and Medicare, as well as other vital programs like unemployment benefits and food stamps. These programs benefit the middle class, the rich and the poor alike. They are the fruits of a civilized society, and these programs will be funded, one way or another, through higher taxes.

Of course even President Obama pretends we can keep the Bush tax cuts on the non-super-rich. And he, like the right-wingers, is wrong. It's arithmetic.

By the way, the taxes we currently pay are a smaller percentage of gross domestic product than any time since I was an infant, and I'll be 60 next year. When the top marginal income taxes were at their highest, in the 1950s and 1960s -- and I can remember the prosperity -- Americans' incomes and standards of living rose more quickly and more sustainedly than they ever have since, especially since the morons like Jeff Flake gained the power they're so loath to give up even after decades of failure.

So even though Jeff Flake will win this election -- as he has with ease every election he's ever faced -- he has to lose the war. In his case, his war against reasonable taxes might as well be the First Punic War. He's that out of touch with his times and the nation he so hates and so badly misunderstands.

Election Day Foretold: Backward-Looking Jeff Flake and His Right-Wing Buddies Will Attempt a Repeal of the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries

There's no doubt Jeff Flake will overwhelmingly win re-election against his opponents. Everyone knows that. His right-wing Republican buddies will surely take control over the House, possibly by a large margin, and they'll very likely take control of the Senate, too. Voters are angry and not very smart about whom to blame for the terrible economy. And they're fed all the crappy misinformation by Fox News and other fear-mongering, paranoid sources funded by billionaires and special interests.

Timothy Egan, in his New York Times blog on American life and politics from a Western perspective, last week wrote a post, "Election Day Foretold," which pretty much states what's going to happen.

You won! What a nice run of the House, with a big enough Republican cushion to free the more pumped-up partisans to hold investigations of Obama’s birth certificate. Let them throw steak scraps at the base, while the rest of you restore Wall Street, the insurance industry and Karl Rove to their rightful places in power.

Speaker-elect Boehner, take a bow. When health care passed, you warned of Armageddon. Now, bring it on. So many promises to keep.

But first, an apology to BP, this time without the retraction. As Congressman Joe Barton tried to say, he’s really sorry that BP is being forced to pay for the human and environmental costs of the biggest oil spill in American history. Your man Barton, a good Texan who’s received more money from the oil, coal and natural gas industry than just about any serving member of the House, is in line to become the next chairman of the committee that oversees energy. Mind you, he’s term-limited in that leadership role — in theory. Just get Boehner to bend the rules, and then gavel in the groveling, baby.

Next up, repeal the health care law. Tell those 20-something deadbeats living at home that they can no longer stay on their parents’ coverage. And give the all-clear signal to insurance companies. Whew. That was close.

With health care repeal, insurers can go back to dropping people when they get sick. Even better, they won’t have to cover those costly whiners with pre-existing conditions, as the new law mandates.

And of course, 30 million Americans who stood to get health care from the market exchanges that were to be phased in can always use the hospital emergency room, as before.

Climate change. Such a myth. A giant conspiracy. The biggest scientific hoax of our time, as Senator James Inhofe has tried to explain. Now, seize the day. You can do something about it — not the hothouse we find ourselves trapped in, but the people who are studying global warming, those elitist scientists.

Sure, it was 113 degrees in Los Angeles the other day, forests in Russia were aflame all summer, and the first eight months of this year set a pace to tie 1998 as the warmest year on record. Time for an investigation: and Congressman James Sensenbrenner, the ranking Republican on the global warming committee, has one ginned up and ready to go. He wants to look at the “science,” wink, wink. So many questions; it’ll be just like when he guided the House through the impeachment of President Clinton.

Speaking of investigations, Rep. Darrell Issa, Republican of California, wants to make good on his promise to double the investigative staff of the government oversight committee and start trolling through the White House for minor scandals. Give that man a fistful of subpoenas and unleash him.

Issa’s committee would be a good place to park a rookie congressman who needs to shake his callow youth reputation — Ben Quayle, Republican of Arizona. The former vice president’s kid had some trouble with the fake family he used on his ads, and wrote for something called “Dirty Scottsdale.” Maybe it takes dirty to know dirty. After calling Obama “the worst president in history,” young Mr. Quayle said, “Somebody has to go to Washington and knock the hell out of the place.”

Along the way, don’t forget to make a run at the federal minimum wage, food and drug regulations, unemployment benefits, even Social Security. All of them are unconstitutional, as many of your candidates said on the trail.

Then, it’s on to the big enchilada, the reason to get back into power: more tax cuts. Some people think this election was a big sporting event, like Game Day on ESPN. They thought it was about rankings and scores, upsets and game-changers. Hah!

The federal deficit is approaching $1.5 trillion. But you promised to make sure that millionaire households get their extension of the Bush tax cuts, though it is likely to add another $700 billion to the deficit over the next decade. It’s in the Pledge to America. A promise is a promise.

Will bigger deficits breathe life into a still-gasping economy? Will giving another couple hundred bucks to households earning more than $250,000 allow the 20 million or so facing foreclosure to stay in their homes? Will investigating earth scientists or Obama’s political appointments make the lives of average Americans easier?

Next question. You trounced the Democrats because of the wretched economy. Voters’ financial lives are fragile, the prospects bleak. Hope turned to empty calories. Reforming Wall Street and health care did nothing to budge the unemployment numbers, a shattering reset for a bruised middle class.

If you make all those companies sitting on piles of cash start hiring people, you’ll be returned to power, perhaps rewarded in an even bigger way in two years. If not, you’ll be remembered for the sideshow: air-guitar legislative attempts to roll back the modern age.

Ultra-Conservative Congressman Jeff Flake Calls for Lowering Minimum Wage to Zero; Claims Change Will Boost Employment

This newswire story got buried this week, but we wanted to call it to your attention:

A Republican congressman from Arizona today called for lowering the minimum wage to zero -- in order, he said, to boost hiring and reduce high levels of unemployment.

Asked about Connecticut Senate candidate Linda McMahon's proposal to lower the minimum wage, Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) said he would prefer that the minimum wage be lowered to zero.

"It's an assault on freedom to force employers to pay their workers a certain level of salary," Flake told a Capitol Hill news conference on the eve of the congressional recess for the election campaign. "Further, the minimum wage is definitely a culprit in our high unemployment rate. It discourages corporations and small business owners from hiring more people at low -- or even no -- wages."

Flake said that the minimum wage was clearly unconstitutional as contemplated by the founding fathers. "People like Washington, Jefferson and Madison certainly didn't intend this as a legitimate role for government. It's a kind of slavery they surely wouldn't approve of. It's too bad that we strayed so far from their principles."

The Arizona congressman said he will introduce a bill in the next session of Congress to lower the minimum wage to nothing. His own re-election is considered a foregone conclusion.

Why the Tea Party Is Nothing But a Scam and Why Jeff Flake and His Cronies Are Un-American

E.J. Dionne, writing in today's Washington Post, explains correctly why the Tea Party is a total scam and not just a collection of elderly white assholes:

Is the Tea Party one of the most successful scams in American political history?

Before you dismiss the question, note that word "successful." Judge the Tea Party purely on the grounds of effectiveness and you have to admire how a very small group has shaken American political life and seized the microphone offered by the media, including the so-called liberal media.

But it's equally important to recognize that the Tea Party constitutes a sliver of opinion on the extreme end of politics receiving attention out of all proportion with its numbers.

Yes, there is a lot of discontent in America. But that discontent is better represented by the moderate voters who expressed quiet disillusionment to President Obama at the CNBC town hall meeting on Monday than by Tea Party ideologues who proclaim the unconstitutionality of the New Deal and everything since.

The Tea Party drowns out such voices because it has money -- some of it from un-populist corporate sources, as Jane Mayer documented last month in the New Yorker -- and has used modest numbers strategically in small states to magnify its impact.

Just recently, Tea Party victories in the Alaska and Delaware Senate primaries shook the nation. In Delaware, Christine O'Donnell received 30,563 votes in the Republican primary, 3,542 votes more than moderate Rep. Mike Castle. In Alaska, Joe Miller won 55,878 votes for a margin of 2,006 over incumbent Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who is now running as a write-in candidate.

Do the math. For weeks now, our national political conversation has been driven by 86,441 voters and a margin of 5,548 votes. A bit of perspective: When John McCain lost in the 2008 presidential race, he received 59.9 million votes.

Earlier this year, much was made of the defeat of Sen. Bob Bennett, a Utah conservative insufficiently conservative for the Tea Party. Bennett lost not in a primary but at a Republican convention attended by all of 3,500 delegates.

Even in larger states, the Tea Party's triumphs were built on small shares of the electorate. Rand Paul received 206,986 votes in Kentucky, where there are more than 1 million registered Republicans and nearly 2.9 million registered voters. Sharron Angle won with 70,452 votes in Nevada, a state with more than 1 million registered voters.

The media have given substantial coverage to Tea Party rallies and even small demonstrations. But how many people are actually involved in this movement?

Last April, a New York Times-CBS News poll found that 18 percent of Americans identified as supporters of the Tea Party movement, but slightly less than a fifth of these sympathizers said they had attended a Tea Party rally or meeting. That means just over 3 percent of Americans can be characterized as Tea Party activists. A more recent poll by Democracy Corps, just before Labor Day, found that 6 percent of voters said they had attended a Tea Party rally or meeting.

The Tea Party is not the only small group in history to wield more power than you'd expect from its numbers. In 2008, Barack Obama did very well in party caucuses, which draw far fewer voters than primaries. And it was Lenin who offered the classic definition of a vanguard party as involving "people who make revolutionary activity their profession" in organizations that "must perforce not be very extensive."

But something is haywire in our media and our politics. Jill Lepore, a Harvard historian whose new book is "The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle Over American History," observed in an interview that there is a "hall of mirrors" effect created by the rise of "niche" opinion media. They magnify small movements into powerhouses, while old-fashioned journalism, which is supposed to put such movements in perspective, reacts to the same niche incentives.

There is also the decline of alternative forces in politics. The Republican establishment, such as it is, has long depended far more on big money than on troops in the field. In search of new battalions, GOP leaders stoked the Tea Party, stood largely mute in the face of its more outrageous untruths about Obama -- and now has to defend candidates such as O'Donnell and Angle.

And where are the progressives? Sulking is not an alternative to organizing, and weary resignation is the first step toward capitulation. The Tea Party may be pulling a fast one on the country and the media. But if it has more audacity than everyone else, it will, I am sorry to say, deserve to get away with it.

In the same Washington Post, Harold Meyerson explains the un-American, distorted thinking of people like right-wing fanatic Rep. Jeff Flake and his Tea Party cronies:

There are un-Americans among us. They don't share our values, yet they control the most powerful offices in the land. We must rid ourselves of this fifth-column menace.

That's pretty much the Republican and Tea Party line these days. When a right-wing talk show host interviewing Sharron Angle, now the Republican senatorial candidate in Nevada, told her last year that "we have domestic enemies" and that some of them worked within "the walls of the Senate and the Congress," Angle chirped up, "I think you're right."

The Tea Partyers aren't wrong about the growing influence of un-Americans in high places. They've just misidentified who those un-Americans are.

As the right-wingers see it, even President Obama's more conventional ideas have no place or precedent in the American experience. Ending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, Dinesh D'Souza reasons in his summa idiotica currently on the cover of Forbes magazine, cannot be explained within the confines of American political thought. However, he writes, "if Obama shares his father's anticolonial crusade, that would explain why he wants people who are already paying close to 50% of their income to pay even more."

I'd like to see D'Souza explain why the highest tax brackets during the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower took 90 percent of people's incomes.

This ascription of all things Obama to alien ideologies and religions -- he's a Muslim, a European socialist, an anti-colonial African Marxist -- has a basis not in empirical fact, of course, but in political logic. It speaks, in powerful metaphoric terms, to that large group of white Americans who see their country slipping away. With each passing year, America grows less white, less powerful and less prosperous, at least from the perspective of all but the rich. There's no correlation between the demographic change and our economic slump, but millions of Americans believe and fear that there is. And for many of those millions, Obama has become the object of their fear and rage that their America is being lost.

In fact, a good deal of American prosperity is being lost, but if there are homegrown agents of this decline, they're not in the administration.

Consider the debate in Congress about whether to impose tariffs on Chinese imports if China continues to depress the value of its currency. Roughly 150 House members, including 45 Republicans, have authored a bill to do just that, and the Ways and Means Committee will take up the bill on Friday. Unions and some domestic manufacturers support the bill. But a large number of American businesses, in a campaign coordinated by the U.S.-China Business Council, oppose it.

Now, there's nothing un-American in opposing the legislation as such -- far from it. Support for and opposition to tariffs are both as American as apple pie. The question here is whether the 220 corporations that belong to the council -- household names such as Coca-Cola, Bank of America, Ford, GM, Wal-Mart, Intel, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, J.P. Morgan Chase, Chevron, Exxon Mobil and Boeing -- are already so deeply invested in China as manufacturers, marketers or retailers that buy goods there to sell them here that their interests are more closely aligned with China's than with America's. Revaluing China's currency would be helpful to domestic U.S. manufacturers, their employees and the communities where those employees live and work, but America's largest companies have long since ceased to be domestic.

Given the explosive growth of the Chinese economy, it's a safe bet that every major U.S. corporation will devote greater resources to building, buying and selling there. But China, unlike the Obama administration, truly is guided by an ideology alien to most Americans -- Leninism -- and wields far greater control over what U.S. corporations can and can't do there than the U.S. government does over what corporations can and can't do here. Our leading companies' economic interests, and those of their Chinese hosts, whom they cross at their peril, are increasing likely to pit them against proposals that diminish China's edge, however obtained, in global competition.

As the Tea Partyers contend, there are un-Americans among us. They hold some of the most powerful offices in the land.

Like Congressman from Arizona's Sixth Congressional District.

Jeff Flake Tells Jobless Over-50 Workers: "Tough Luck. Not My Problem. In Fact, I'll Take Away Your Unemployment Benefits. The Rich Need Tax Cuts."

What does Jeff Flake tell the many East Valley residents and other Americans who have worked all their lives until the Great Recession but now find themselves among the long-term unemployed and who fear, because they are over 50 and no longer in demand, that they may never work again?

"Tough shit, ladies and gentlemen," Jeff Flake tells them. "It's not my problem. It's not the job of the federal government to help you in any way - not in a market economy. You lazy bastards shouldn't even be getting unemployment insurance benefits or food stamps or anything. My role is to make sure millionaires and billionaires pay less taxes."

That about sums up what the fanatic free-market extremist Congressman tells people like the ones highlighted in a front-page New York Times story about older workers who've been laid off and can't find jobs no matter how desperately they try and who are scared and desperate:

For the Unemployed Over 50, Fears of Never Working Again

By Motoko Rich

VASHON ISLAND, Wash. — Patricia Reid is not in her 70s, an age when many Americans continue to work. She is not even in her 60s. She is just 57.

But four years after losing her job she cannot, in her darkest moments, escape a nagging thought: she may never work again.

College educated, with a degree in business administration, she is experienced, having worked for two decades as an internal auditor and analyst at Boeing before losing that job.

But that does not seem to matter, not for her and not for a growing number of people in their 50s and 60s who desperately want or need to work to pay for retirement and who are starting to worry that they may be discarded from the work force — forever.

Since the economic collapse, there are not enough jobs being created for the population as a whole, much less for those in the twilight of their careers.

Of the 14.9 million unemployed, more than 2.2 million are 55 or older. Nearly half of them have been unemployed six months or longer, according to the Labor Department. The unemployment rate in the group — 7.3 percent — is at a record, more than double what it was at the beginning of the latest recession.

After other recent downturns, older people who lost jobs fretted about how long it would take to return to the work force and worried that they might never recover their former incomes. But today, because it will take years to absorb the giant pool of unemployed at the economy’s recent pace, many of these older people may simply age out of the labor force before their luck changes.

For Ms. Reid, it has been four years of hunting — without a single job offer. She buzzes energetically as she describes the countless applications she has lobbed through the Internet, as well as the online courses she is taking to burnish her software skills.

Still, when she is pressed, her can-do spirit falters.

“There are these fears in the background, and they are suppressed,” said Ms. Reid, who is now selling some of her jewelry and clothes online and is late on some credit card payments. “I have had nightmares about becoming a bag lady,” she said. “It could happen to anyone. So many people are so close to it, and they don’t even realize it.”

Being unemployed at any age can be crushing. But older workers suspect their résumés often get shoved aside in favor of those from younger workers. Others discover that their job-seeking skills — as well as some technical skills sought by employers — are rusty after years of working for the same company.

Many had in fact anticipated working past conventional retirement ages to gird themselves financially for longer life spans, expensive health care and reduced pension guarantees.

The most recent recession has increased the need to extend working life. Home values, often a family’s most important asset, have been battered. Stock portfolios are only now starting to recover. According to a Gallup poll in April, more than a third of people not yet retired plan to work beyond age 65, compared with just 12 percent in 1995.

Older workers who lose their jobs could pose a policy problem if they lose their ability to be self-sufficient. “That’s what we should be worrying about,” said Carl E. Van Horn, professor of public policy and director of the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University, “what it means to this class of the new unemployables, people who have been cast adrift at a very vulnerable part of their career and their life.”

Forced early retirement imposes an intense financial strain, particularly for those at lower incomes. The recession and its aftermath have already pushed down some older workers. In figures released last week by the Census Bureau, the poverty rate among those 55 to 64 increased to 9.4 percent in 2009, from 8.6 percent in 2007.

But even middle-class people who might skate by on savings or a spouse’s income are jarred by an abrupt end to working life and to a secure retirement.

“That’s what I spent my whole life in pursuit of, was security,” Ms. Reid said. “Until the last few years, I felt very secure in my job.”

As an auditor, Ms. Reid loved figuring out the kinks in a manufacturing or parts delivery process. But after more than 20 years of commuting across Puget Sound to Boeing, Ms. Reid was exhausted when she was let go from her $80,000-a-year job.

Stunned and depressed, she sent out résumés, but figured she had a little time to recover. So she took vacations to Turkey and Thailand with her husband, who is a home repairman. She sought chiropractic treatments for a neck injury and helped nurse a priest dying of cancer.

Most of her days now are spent in front of a laptop, holed up in a lighthouse garret atop the house that her husband, Denny Mielock, built in the 1990s on a breathtaking piece of property overlooking the sound.

As she browses the job listings that clog her e-mail in-box, she refuses to give in to her fears. “If I let myself think like that all the time,” she said, “I could not even bear getting out of bed in the morning.”

With her husband’s home repair business pummeled by the housing downturn, the bills are mounting. Although the couple do not have a mortgage on their 3,000-square-foot house, they pay close to $7,000 a year in property taxes. The roof is leaking. Their utility bills can be $300 a month in the winter, even though they often keep the thermostat turned down to 50 degrees.

They could try to sell their home, but given the depressed housing market, they are reluctant.

“We are circling the drain here, and I am bailing like hell,” said Ms. Reid, emitting an incongruous cackle, as if laughter is the only response to her plight. “But the boat is still sinking.”

It is not just the finances that have destabilized her life.

Her husband worries that she isolates herself and that she does not socialize enough. “We’ve both been hard workers our whole lives,” said Mr. Mielock, 59. Ms. Reid sometimes rose just after 3 a.m. to make the hourlong commute to Boeing’s data center in Bellevue and attended night school to earn a master’s in management information systems.

“A job is more than a job, you know,” Mr. Mielock said. “It’s where you fit in society.”

Here in the greater Seattle area, a fifth of those claiming extended unemployment benefits are 55 and older.

To help seniors polish their job-seeking skills, WorkSource, a local consortium of government and nonprofit groups, recently began offering seminars. On a recent morning, 14 people gathered in a windowless conference room at a local community college to get tips on how to age-proof their résumés and deflect questions about being overqualified.

Motivational posters hung on one wall, bearing slogans like “Failure is the path of least persistence.”

Using PowerPoint slides, Liz Howland, the chipper but no-nonsense session leader, projected some common myths about older job-seekers on a screen: “Older workers are less capable of evaluating information, making decisions and problem-solving” or “Older workers are rigid and inflexible and have trouble adapting to change.”

Ms. Howland, 61, ticked off the reasons those statements were inaccurate. But a clear undercurrent of anxiety ran through the room. “Is it really true that if you have the energy and the passion that they will overlook the age factor?” asked a 61-year-old man who had been laid off from a furniture maker last October.

Gallows humor reigned. As Ms. Howland — who suggested that applicants remove any dates older than 15 years from their résumé — advised the group on how to finesse interview questions like “When did you have the job that helped you develop that skill?” one out-of-work journalist deadpanned: “How about ‘during the 20th century?’ ”

During a break, Anne Richard, who declined to give her age, confessed she was afraid she would not be able to work again after losing her contract as a house director at a University of Washington sorority in June. Although she had 20 years of experience as an office clerk in Chattanooga, Tenn., she feared her technology skills had fallen behind.

“I don’t feel like I can compete with kids who have been on computers all their lives,” said Ms. Richard, who was sleeping on the couch of a couple she had met at church and contemplating imminent homelessness.

Older people who lose their jobs take longer to find work. In August, the average time unemployed for those 55 and older was slightly more than 39 weeks, according to the Labor Department, the longest of any age group. That is much worse than in August 1983, also after a deep recession, when someone unemployed in that age group spent an average of 27.5 weeks finding work.

At this year’s pace of an average of 82,000 new jobs a month, it will take at least eight more years to create the 8 million positions lost during the recession. And that does not even allow for population growth.

Advocates for the elderly worry that younger people are more likely to fill the new jobs as well.

Rep. Jeff Flake's attitude is shameful to people like me and his Democratic opponent Rebecca Schneider. Liberals believe that governmment should help those who have been thrown out of work and are facing desperate times through no fault of their own.

Just as in the Great Depression, the current Great Recession requires strong government intervention to help those who are suffering because of the inequities of the free market that Jeff Flake believes is working perfectly, even now.

Why, Jeff Flake doesn't believe in even the safety net of unemployment insurance benefits we've had since the 1930s. He's voted against them 23 times. If he and his right-wing buddies take control of Congress -- something he was crowing about this morning on National Public Radio's "Morning Edition" -- he plans to eliminate unemployment benefits entirely, as well as end the food stamp program, take away Medicare from seniors, end Social Security.

You see, Jeff Flake believes the only job in a free market is to make sure millionaires and billionaires pay nothing in taxes. Well, that's reasonable - if you're Jeff Flake and corrupt billionaires like the Koch brothers have bankrolled your cushy political career for a decade.

If you're unemployed -- or you have a loved one who is -- or maybe you fear you might lose your job and find it hard to get another one, maybe you should think about voting for someone other than the billionaires' best friend and the enemy of decent hard-working families, four-term Congressman Jeff Flake.

Rep. Jeff Flake: He'll Work His Ass Off for the Billionaires Who Pay His Bills

As Frank Rich wrote in his exposé of the billionaires who bankroll the Tea Party and radical Republicans like Arizona's sure-winner-as-a-five-term Congressman Jeff Flake:

Their program opposes a federal deficit, but has no objection to running up trillions in red ink in tax cuts to corporations and the superrich; apologizes to corporate malefactors like BP and derides money put in escrow for oil spill victims as a “slush fund”; opposes the extension of unemployment benefits; and calls for a freeze on federal regulations in an era when abuses in the oil, financial, mining, pharmaceutical and even egg industries (among others) have been outrageous.

The radical billionaires of Koch Industries gave safe-seat Jeff Flake $12,500 in campaign contributions in 2008 and more this year.

When he and his Republican allies control Congress, they can start taking away unemployment insurance, Medicare and Social Security and shoveling more money to their big-corporation benefactors like Koch Industries, which has recently received almost a hundred million dollars in federal funding.

Jeff Flake: a Congressman who will stand up for the rights of billionaires and do shit for 99% in the East Valley. If you're really stupid - and most of you in the East Valley are - you'll vote for him in November.