“I, however, place economy among the first and most important republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared.”

Let’s cut to the chase.

Suppose you don’t really give a damn about The Constitution.

Suppose you’re okay with a hockey mom, who doesn’t know the first thing about Russia except that on a clear day she can see it from the front door of her igloo, controlling the “newcular” (yep, she pronounces it just like His Highness, GW) codes.

Suppose you’re okay with the U.S. policy of inflicting torture on anyone the Administration suspects of harboring ill will toward us.

Suppose you don’t care if the Supreme Court boards a time machine and warps back to 1908.

And suppose you are okay with the U.S. invading Iran, Pakistan and any other sovereign nation on a whim.

The bottom line in this election for you should, at least, be “Are you better off now than you were in 2000?” Unless you are a professional, and by that I mean a doctor, lawyer or major league athlete, the answer is, “You’re not.”

According to the Wall Street Journal, data from the U.S. Census Bureau for the period from 2000 to 2007 (2008 data is not yet available) shows “Workers with professional degrees, such as doctors and lawyers, were the only educational group to see their inflation-adjusted earnings increase” in this period.

“Workers in every other educational group — including Ph.D.s as well as high school dropouts — earned less in 2007 than they did in 2000, adjusted for inflation.”

The following table shows the inflation-adjusted wage change for the various degree levels from 2000 to 2007:

And yet, John McCain, echoing the Bush Administration, insists the economy is “fundamentally sound” and offers no initiative to address this situation, preferring, instead, to offer tax breaks to corporations “so they can afford to keep jobs in the U.S. instead of shipping them offshore.”

Now, I don’t know about you, but I simply don’t have the misplaced faith, which, apparently, John McCain has, that most companies will use tax cuts to save American jobs when they can continue to ship jobs offshore and use those tax cuts, instead, to increase their bottom line.

It seems to me we should be more concerned about which candidate is most committed to addressing the abysmal U.S. economic situation than about which one can exhibit the most outrage over “putting lipstick on a pig.”