70%

Give them credit: the Tea Partiers have done the seemingly impossible. They've introduced the topic of economics, in the form of numbers-laden debt concerns, into the public debate. Working in contradiction to the standard GOP playbook of manipulating voters with divisive social issues (abortion, flag burning, gays anyone?), the TP'ers have led us down the path of speculating on what, exactly, would need to be done to balance the budget...and erase the deficit.

Now, the cynical may ask where those sentiments were when Bill Clinton actually created a surplus, and introduced the idea that you can't fund new programs until you find an offset in the federal budget to pay for them. I don't recall too many people at the time urging that impeachment proceedings be dismissed lest they take the national eye off the ball of financial restraint.

And I don't recall a peep from these same outraged Americans when George Bush spent eight years squandering what Clinton had saved, spending like a former cocaine-addled AWOL pilot now making amends by playing soldiers with real humans. How to pay for his overseas follies? Easy. Just take the cost off the books. Leave it for the next guy to figure out. See how simple that was?

Well, at any rate we're now having a financial conversation. You can't flip a cable channel without some numbnuts throwing out a string of numbers. And that can get confusing. Thus, the title of this post--the only number that really matters: 70%.

That's the portion of the U.S. economy that depends on a single source--consumer spending. That includes every loaf of bread and box of Kleenex...every new McMansion, Escalade and pedicure. Unless consumers continue to spend, our economy will remain a mere shadow of its former self.

Now, think about what works against consumer spending: consumers not having enough money; consumers having mortgages that are higher than the value of their homes; consumers unable to get a loan for a new car; consumers not having jobs. If there's one thing we learned from the last two bubbles, maybe it's that you really can't spend money you don't have without eventually needing to pay it back. (Unless, of course, you're a Wall Street banker, in which case you can pretty much do what you want).

There's no conservative I know of (excepting Ron Paul) who believes that laying off even more workers, shutting more factories, sending more jobs overseas, further reducing wages and shredding the social safety net is the necessary medicine to cure what ails the economy. Even if that were the right prescription, it would take decades to return us to health. In the interim, the collapsing economy would begin to feed on its own decay, reducing consumer spending to levels not seen since the forced reductions of World War II.

And the amazing part of this is the inability of most large corporations to look past their own balance sheets. Of course, it is in their nature to want more productivity, a higher stock price, and greater profits. And if taxpayers are willing to help underwrite that with their tax dollars...and more of their workers are thrown out on the street...well, that's just the price of progress. That's the 'free market' at work.

But when virtually all corporations act the same way, helping 'carve out' the American economy by subjecting the middle class to financial genocide, there is, at best, a long and painful road to recovery.

How do you achieve 70% consumer spending when consumers have nothing left to spend?