Balancing the federal budget by cutting both taxes and spending is like saying I’ll pay off the credit card by quitting my job and living off Ramen noodles.

That 47% of all Americans don’t pay federal income taxes is an old Republican line.

We shouldn’t be surprised that Romney said it. He’s already proved he’ll say anything to get elected. Ragging on the 47% is par for the Republican course.

But let’s unpack why this was not a gaffe for Romney. Sure, liberals heard him picking on the poor, but he wasn’t talking to liberals.

He was talking to people that work hard, and feel like they still can’t make ends meet. He’s also talking to people that run their own businesses, and feel they’ve had to fight for everything they own.

To those people, hearing that 47% of Americans don’t pay income taxes doesn’t make you wonder who could be so poor that they’re exempt. It doesn’t make you question the wisdom of the Reagan and Bush tax cuts that caused the number of the exempt to swell.

It makes you angry. And angry people don’t check facts. They vote their anger.

Even getting burned in the press for saying this is good for Mitt Romney. After all, what he said is true; attacking him for saying it only further alienates the people he’s talking to.

So don’t think this was anything other than a carefully constructed Republican sound bite. Cause Romney isn’t sorry he said it. He’s sorry he didn’t say it sooner.

Romney and the Republicans think the government spends too much money. They want to slash federal and state budgets across the board.

At a time when millons of Americans are looking for work, they want to cut unemployment benefits.

At a time when many Americans need help buying food for their children, they want to cut food stamps.

At a time when more Americans than ever before want to go to college, they want to cut federal school grants and loans.

They insist that the one thing we can’t do is raise taxes on the rich. Raising taxes would allow us to keep federal programs that provide help to millions of Americans, but the Republicans say it’s not worth it.

They’d rather make sure Wall Street bankers can buy their third house than help you keep yours.

They’d rather Mitt Romney’s friends put a little extra into their kids’ trust funds than help young mothers feed their children.

They’d rather the CEO of Goldman Sachs take home an extra million dollars than help a million Americans pay for college.

That’s a trade we can’t afford to make.

A Romney Administration: We Can’t Afford It.

Mitt Romney and the Republicans have a very narrow conception of freedom.

For them, freedom is letting you go without health insurance.

For them, freedom is telling a pregnant rape victim she has to carry that child to term.

For them, freedom is denying women access to birth control.

That’s not my kind of freedom.

Freedom means letting women choose when to have kids.

Freedom means choosing and being able to afford your doctor.

Romney and the Republicans want companies to be free, but not people. They’ve forgotten that this is a country of, by, and for the people.

They’ve forgotten what it means to be free.

Mitt Romney and the Republicans think private enterprise is the solution to every problem.

They wish our government worked more like a business.

But how would you feel if 911 asked for your credit card number before they helped you out?

How would you feel if firefighters asked to see your fire insurance card before rescuing your daughter from a burning building?

How would you feel if your kids had to drop out of school after first grade, because you couldn’t afford to send them to second?

This is the world Republicans want. They won’t stop until everything is run by private enterprise. They won’t stop until the only people that get what they need are those too rich to need it.

We can’t afford that. We can’t afford a Romney Administration.

Romney and other Republicans want to cut government spending across the board.

That means less money for your police officers.

Less money for your fire fighters.

Less money for the schools your children go to.

Romney and the Republicans don’t care if fewer of your children can go to college.

They don’t care if the roads you drive to work on are covered in potholes.

They don’t care if your grandmother’s Social Security check is a little less each month because of government cutbacks.

And why should they? Romney made $21 million last year. He can afford to send his kids to school on his own. He can pay for his own police, his own firefighters, if he needs them.

He can afford to leave you and yours behind. But we can’t.

We can’t afford that.

Let’s talk a bit about Mitt Romney’s background.

• His father, George Romney, served as Governor of Michigan for two terms, after his stint as American Motors Corporation CEO.
• Rather than serve in Vietnam, he spent time overseas, in France.
• He earned his law degree at Harvard, then followed his father into politics, eventually winning the governorship of Massachusetts.

Does anyone else remember the last Republican Presidential candidate that was Ivy-League educated, whose father was rich and into politics, who ignored his country’s call to arms in Vietnam?

Oh, yeah: George W. Bush.

And what did the Bush Administration give us?

• Devastation in New Orleans as the levees broke and the feds bungled their response.
• Not one, but two wars costing thousands of American lives.
• The worst economic recession since the Great Depression.

We can’t afford a return to the Bush years.

We can’t afford Mitt Romney.

Romney picking Paul Ryan for his VP doesn’t matter.

Here’s why:

• If elected, Romney would still be in charge of policy
• Romney’s policy proposals differ from Obama’s only by being worse

Is it important to like my job, or do I just need to be good at it?

Is it enough to find fulfillment outside of work? In friends and family and creative projects squeezed in around the edges?

Is it worth it to trade financial security for being able to do what I want, when I want?

Can I handle the possibility of failure? How much failure would be too much? Will staying safe make me happy?

Both Google and Facebook are ripe for some small little startup to come roaring out of San Francisco and kick their ass.

Google’s become so wrapped up in Android and building hardware that it’s dropping the ball on its core product: search. Searching on Google is still easy, but the search results now are a confusing jumble of ads and links that open side windows, all while the Google Toolbar hovers over, watching everything and praying you’ll post something to Google+.

The results themselves aren’t as good as they used to be. The first search result is almost always wrong now; I have to scroll through several pages sometimes to find what I’m looking for.

A startup that focused on a minimalist design and accurate search results, even if they were slower than Google, would be a serious competitor.

Facebook’s falling down on the job, too.

Their privacy controls are too complicated. And why wouldn’t they be? The company gets all its money from using your data. It wants you to share things. Their entire financial incentive is built around breaking down privacy; why would they make it easy to wall things off?

Their UI has also gotten complicated to the point of abuse. I hate logging into Facebook these days, and only stay long enough to respond to a Friend request. I get in and get out as fast as possible.

Again, a startup built around controlled sharing, that actually charged for the ability to control who and what was shared, with a simpler UI, would put a dent in Facebook’s market share. I’d pay for a better user experience and the ability to easily control who saw what. Wouldn’t you?