Happy Tax Day! By now, I trust you are either well on your way to getting your refund, getting the IRS off your back by having mailed them a check, or keeping the IRS temporarily off your back (or delaying your own refund gratification) by having filed your extension application--or will by midnight. Maybe you attended one of those staged "tea parties" flogged by Fake News and bankrolled by Dick Armey and a couple of conservative PACs. (Hopefully, not as a participant). Here's why I hope if you went, you were there as either a heckler or out of morbid curiosity. Just as in Thomas Frank's "What's the Matter With Kansas," the megawealthy corporate/Wall Street establishment (i.e., shepherds with Twitter cattle prods) has managed to once again hoodwink a not insufficient number of the poor and middle classes (i.e., sheep watching cable news or cradling their BlackBerrys) into defending the super-rich against the poor and middle classes. In scenes eerily reminiscent of the crowd at last summer's Republican National Convention, photographers snapped numerous images of people standing in rainy plazas mugging for the cameras, dangling teabags, hanging teabags off their umbrellas and even bedecking their rainhats and parka hoods with teabags to the point where they resembled Lipton sheepdogs. (And call it a hunch, but somehow I doubt these folks brought these little sachets of caffeinated symbolism with them from their own kitchens). And all the while, across the country, they chanted the trenchant, meaningful, protest slogan" "U.S.A.! U.S.A.!" As if letting the GOP fool them into doing its dirty work was a form of patriotism akin to cheering on Michael Phelps in the Olympics or marching in a Fourth of July parade. Oh, please. Gets better---conservative blogs and Facebook pages instructed "spontaneous protestors" to parrot canned talking points such as "This is not the time to spend money!" "We can't spend what we don't have!" "Get the government off our backs!" (funny, they didn't chant that one when they were being wiretapped and having their library cards and book purchases monitored) and "We're mortgaging our children's futures!" (which they likewise never chanted when the government was mortgaging our children's environmental futures---or when Wall Street, or themselves as willingly complicit junk-loan borrowers, were ACTUALLY MORTGAGING our children's and our own futures). One of these blogs actually offered $250 rewards for the catchiest slogans the "citizen teabaggers" could devise--thus saving the GOP a tidy sum it would otherwise have to have blown on focus groups and ad agencies. Well, the truth is that this is PRECISELY what stimulating a foundering economy means--spending money we don't have to generate money we will make many times over. We've done it for decades, even centuries. It's called "credit," which (despite what every conservative other than those who issue bank cards will tell you) is NOT always inherently bad. Whenever a corporation, municipality, utility, or school district issues bonds, it's borrowing so it can spend money it doesn't have--and when you buy those bonds (yes, even those Series E savings bonds you racked up as kids) you are lending it to them. The cold hard truth is, as was shown when at first the New Deal succeeded dramatically and then went blooey when FDR obeyed those who warned about deficit spending, that if we DON'T go out on a limb and borrow or levy in order to spend money we don't yet have on certain necessities such as infrastructure, education, priming the pump for a resurgence of responsible consumption, and healthcare, we are going to be doing a heck of a lot worse to our kids' future than mortgaging it. And taxes? Ah, yes, those evil taxes of which we must not force the super-rich and the largest corporations to pay their fair share. It was revealed today that 90% of the wealthiest corporations in America set up offshore accounts (cue the jingle..."Cay-man Is-lands...") to avoid paying ANY Federal income tax at all, sticking you and me with a HUNDRED BILLION BUCKS of a tax bill, sucking it right out of OUR pockets. Yeah, even those of you pulling down half a mill per year--YOU helped pay ALL of Coca-Cola's and Dell's income tax this year. Interestingly, one of the wealthiest corporations in America refused to set up offshore accounts, and ponied up its fair share like the rest of us: Home Depot. So how would you like to stimulate the economy, show your appreciation for a responsible corporation, improve your own surroundings, and even employ many of our future Olympians between competitions? Fix your deck, plant your garden or window boxes, paint your house or apartment, buy a new sink or toilet seat, or even a carton of CFL lightbulbs--and buy the stuff from Home Depot.