45. Starving the Beast

Austerity. Grover Norquist. The merging of investment and commercial banking. A major party's insistence that shifting the nation's tax burden away from "job creators" and onto the poor and middle class is the only way out, despite the fact that tax cuts for the wealthy do nothing at all to spur economic growth.

 It reads like a paranoid conspiracy theory. Only it isn't. It's the story of how we came to our current place of deficits, income inequality, and economic instability. And you don't need a degree in economics to understand it. (A plus!)

Interested closet members can read more in this article, written by Tim Dickenson for the November 24, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone. You'll be glad you did.

Then again, maybe you'll just want to flee to Canada.

Economist Paul Krugman on economic morality.

(Click here to view an interactive timeline of the Global Economic Crisis, courtesy of the non-partisan, non-profit Council on Foreign Relations.)