11% of the Fortune 500 companies haven't paid a dime in taxes for three years. And 28% of the U.S. largest companies have avoided paying any taxes in at least one of the last three years.

The mantra that we continue to hear from the far right...not everyone mind you, just the most ideologically conservative...is that taxing our job creators would be economically destructive. The same argument is made for increasing the taxes on the top percent or so of the wealthiest Americans.

Yet with this kind of a tax code and tax rates, our real unemployment rate is well into the teens, if we count all the people who are long-term unemployed and have given up. And the distribution of wealth in the country is noticeably tilted so that the income of the richest Americans keeps rising at a rate that is a significant multiple of the bottom 80% of so of the country. We have become a country of haves and have nots and the have nots are a growing part of the population. At the same time our government keeps spending at a rate that wouldn't be sustainable, even in a strong and growing economy.

Yet, the most fiscally conservative among us continue to argue that modifying the tax code and tax rates, if it produces even one additional dollar in revenue to the government is a bad thing. Their position is so entrenched that they won't even enter into a negotiation on significant spending cuts if a revenue increase is part of the deal.

All I can say is...Greece, here we come!