Print edition: 
Incredible as it seems to rational people, the fiscal fundamentalists who have seized control of the Republican Party are apparently willing to extend the country's economic woes indefinitely.
This despite the fact that most of those fiscal fundamentalists are the very people who will pay the harshest price for inaction.
Contrary to the fundamentalists' expressed fears, agreeing on a plan — almost any reasonable plan — that can put people back to work wouldn't be ideological Armageddon; it would be incremental progress, and its discovered shortcomings could be adjusted as necessary.
About 14 million Americans are out of work; millions more are underemployed or in part-time or temporary jobs; a second wave of recession looms; from June 2009 to June 2011, median household income fell another 6.7 percent; house values are dragging; the unhealthy gap between the very rich and the rest of Americans continues to grow.
And inflation is casting shadows onto that dreary canvas. For example, in the past few weeks Wichitans got a hint of what will happen to them next year. We have been notified that:
* Water rates will go up, in part because people are being frugal in using it.
* Westar Energy will get another rate increase, because falling electricity use threatens Westar's assured profit margin.
* Blue Cross drug-insurance premiums will go up almost 9 percent and co-payment requirements increase.
* Health insurance premiums will rise again.
* For some, bank fees for the use of debit cards will go into effect.
* And even Fritos and Gatorade prices will rise, PepsiCo announced.
For millions on fixed or shrinking incomes, there's only darkness on the horizon.
President Obama keeps saying that the Republicans have no ideas for dealing with all that gloom. The problem is they do, and all their ideas are about cutting corporate taxes and shrinking government by putting tens of thousands more people out of work.
It's the old and disreputable theory of trickle down: If we simply free businesses from taxes and regulations, jobs will suddenly appear everywhere. It's a theory that ignores even its most recent refutation: the George W. Bush retreat from effective regulation and the huge tax cuts of nine years ago, still in effect, that produced the lowest tax rates in 60 years. So where are all the jobs?
Yet fiscal fundamentalists continue to be willing to let ideology trump the clear needs of the American economy, and the Republican leadership is willing to tag along.
The confounding thing is that the leadership's acquiescence may reflect an accurate reading of a loud and persistent, if minority, sentiment running in America's middle class, which stands to suffer most from congressional deadlock. Despite decades of evidence to the contrary, millions of Americans still buy into trickle down, and the Republican leadership cynically encourages them to continue working against their self-interest.
Of course that's understandable given that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., declared early in 2009 that the party's primary mission was to ensure that the Obama administration was a failure no matter the cost.
The Republican leadership continues to hold America's economy hostage to that narrow and purblind intent when what is needed most, and most immediately, is tax reform and the infusion of spending power into a middle class seemingly set upon self-destruction.
