An average workday usually provides me with abundant opportunities for righteous indignation. Yesterday being a docile exception, I arrived home looking for an outlet for my pent-up rage.

Fortunately for my family and my dog, the junior senator from South Carolina stepped once more into the breach.

DeMint again proved more than worthy of his role as shill for the Heritage Foundation, boisterously hawking tax cuts as the solution to our current economic crisis and to a lifetime of future economic ills besides.

Some on TPM have played down the tax cut message as having no traction. I disagree.

For more than two decades, Republicans have succeeded in getting nearly half the electorate to vote for candidates presenting government as the problem, and tax cuts as the solution. Yes, it's voodoo economics. But it's a simple message with innate appeal to working families juggling four jobs to pay some bills and put food on the table.

The intrinsic evil of this message and its underlying strategy is a topic for another time.

Today, the administration and Congressional Democrats should recognize voodoo economics as a formidable foe. They should be treating the boxer in the opposing corner as Apollo Creed, and striking back with everything they have.

DeMint's plan would drop the top marginal rate to 25 percent. Whatever else it might achieve (once again, a topic for another time), this "stimulus" would benefit less than one percent of taxpayers.

Since I'm not fortunate enough to be part of that one percent, I guess I won't get really stimulated by this permutation of voodoo economics. Nonetheless, I thought it might be useful to look at things from my perspective.

Call it a doll's eye view.

Let's dream for a moment and say DeMint decided to propose reducing federal income taxes for the 99 percent neglected by the Heritage Foundation. Let's say I wind up with an extra $1,000 come refund time. Where am I going to spend that windfall?

Big screen tv? No way. New car? Don't want the payments, can't afford 'em anyway. Fancy suit for me or a designer dress for my wife? Guess you don't know me very well. Dinner at PF Chang's? I'd have to think about that one.

Consumption is out in my house, baby. Savings and debt reduction are in. First I'd pay off my credit cards. If I had any left, it would go to savings. I've been trying to start a college fund for my son for years. Soon he'll be in college.

In other words, no stimulus from the bluemeanie clan. And since the average family owes thirty percent more than they bring in, I'm pretty sure we're not the only ones.

Personally, I'd pay more taxes if the return was some promise of job and wage security and the real financial freedom that comes with them. And the only thing that will create jobs in the short and medium term is direct investment in infrastructure and other things that aren't consumption-driven.

One of the things that scares me about the stimulus/economic recovery bluster on both sides of the aisle is that it too much, if not all, focuses on restoring prior levels of consumer consumption. I think those days are over.

Like others of his day, Adam Smith used a few too many words to make a point. But this one is insightful:

A profitable speculation is presented as a public good because growth will stimulate demand and everywhere diffuse comfort and improvement. No patriot or man of feeling could therefore oppose it.

But the nature of this growth, in opposition, for example, to older ideas such as cultivation, is that it is at once undirected and infinitely self-generating in the endless demand for all the useless things in the world.

This massive economic flameout is what Nassim Nicholas Teleb would call a black swan. It's the result of decades of excess consumption fueled by expectations of limitless growth. We've met the enemy, and it is us. Whether we like it or not, we're charting a new course here. And I damn sure hope the Heritage Foundation isn't drawing the map.

Ouch. Pull that pin out, Senator Jim. It hurts, and you're insane.