Yes, us lay-folk certainly do understand the problem, apparently much better than those we put into a position of power.

They tell us they are the one, they promise us to solve the problem, they get into a position of power and they want more of our money. We can never give enough to satisfy the never ending thirst emanating from Washington.

The burden falls on the working poor and the middle class. Washington drives the middle class into the working poor with their unhindered taxing.

They raise taxes every day, not just on our work; new taxes on food, drink, entertainment, gas, automobiles, clothing and on and on. Hidden and individually minor, but they add up and they are a new tax.

This is what needs to stop. Democrats refuse to stop, that is the only way they get votes is to purchase the vote. Republicans play the same game but behind the scenes.

The current congressional crop needs to be harvested and a new crop brought in with term limits (3 terms-Congress, 1 term Senate), fewer benefits, more restrictions and less pay. Without this restraint, they will crush us as a country. Vote them out in 2012, 2014, and on until they are all gone.

Show where higher taxes have lead to deficit reduction and job growth.

Start with Europe, and their constant double digit unemployment and massive deficits.

This notion that we are undertaxed is absurd. The notion that the defict has to do with a lack of tax revenue is a fantasy.

I'm going to have to take the third road here gentlemen,
It's not that Americans don't understand, it's that they don't care.
Apathy rules - as long as you don't interrupt my Casey Anthony coverage or my fast food glutton-fest, I don't care if the country burns around us.

Personally, I am stocking up on canned goods and shotgun shells.
;)

Amen when it comes to growth being a key component to any victorious GOP strategy and an absolute requirement for any way out of the growing debt crisis.
The projected growth claims being made by the Obama administration are especially ludicrous given what it has already done to stymie growth and the depressive effects that will become more and more pronounced as Obamacare and new financial regulations steadily strangle the economy.
Throw in Obama's continual threats to raise taxes and you have a formula for the kind of systemic stagnation that has plagued Europe for years.
None of this should come as a surprise. Obama has never been interested in dynamic growth; only redistribution. The surprising thing is that so many people who should have known better actually expected positive things out a Keynesian stimulus bill that principally served to remove a trillion dollars from the private economy and re-direct it to the bottomless swamp of government.
What we need is an approach that would simultaneously shrink the size of government in both real terms and relative to the GDP, while boosting GDP itself with reforms designed to free market forces. At a minimum, such reforms would include elimination of capital gains and corporate taxes; simplification of a tax structure that would both abandon social engineering -- including progressivity -- and encourage initiative, entrepreneurship and business expansion; and a sharp reduction of excessive regulations that waste private resources and sap economic vitality.
In other words, less Keynes and Marx and more Adam Smith.

There is already a time-tested, politically useful phrase available for reducing regulations and that is "cutting red tape."
As in, "Government red tape is strangling small businesses," "Government red tape is choking the economy," "There's so much government red tape it would stretch from here to the moon and back," and "Obama's idea for growing the economy comes down hiring to hiring thousands of bureaucrats, supplying each one of them with a mile of red tape, and sending them to your door to tell you, 'We're from the government and we're here to help."

Too many people feed at the public trough. When we add up Government employees, Medicare and Medicaid enrollees, Social Security and SSI beneficiaries, Earned Income and Child Tax Credit recipients, it is apparent that far more than half of us put into our pockets money taken from the minority. The minority wants to stop this, but the majority has too much at stake. One ardent libertarian friend of mine (a recent retiree) became enraged when the Republican Governor of Michigan moved to impose a State Income tax on his state employee pension. He knows the state needs the money - he just thinks it should come out of someone else's pocket.

This is why in the early days of this nation, voting was limited to property owners. They wanted to make sure that you had a vested interest in electing the right people, not so that you would vote for the candidates who gave out the most entitlements.