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So it turns out that I'm not the only one tired of comparisons between the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street.

In case you haven't noticed, leading conservatives -- including Sarah Palin -- have been talking a lot lately about "crony capitalism." This phrase started turning up well before the hyped up Solyndra scandal and is now heard even more often.

A debate over the cozy ties between government and corporations is long overdue. Unfortunately, that is not the debate we are likely to get from the likes of Ron Paul and Sarah Palin.

Clean energy skeptics have seized on the failure of Solyndra to argue that scaling up renewable sources is a pipe dream.

They should visit Germany.

The latest attack on green jobs attempts to portray the U.S. Department of Labor’s green jobs training program as a failure and claims that President Obama failed on his promise to create 5 million green jobs by the end of the decade.

Here's a data point that slipped under the radar when the U.S. Labor Department released its latest job numbers earlier this month: Layoffs of public sector workers accounted for the biggest chunk of pink slips handed out overall in September.

It's no secret that the technology industry is gung-ho about a corporate tax repatriation holiday. After all, many big tech firms do a huge amount of business abroad and have piled up a mountain of foreign profits that they are now itching to bring home during a one-time holiday where they would pay a fraction of the usual tax rate. In fact, no other industry now holds more cash overseas.

They say it's tough to make predictions, especially about the future. But a month or two from now, I expect media outlets to look at their outlays for coverage of Herman Cain's campaign -- the thousands of dollars shelled out for plane fare, rental cars, hotels and so on -- and be appalled. In the age of contraction,  political coverage is increasingly a zero sum game.

Listen to some critics and you might think that a thriving greens jobs sector is just another utopian fantasy.

In fact, it is an empirical reality.

One of the most frustrating things about the present moment is that public distrust of government is surging at exactly the moment when we need a bold and effective public sector. Worse, while Americans now seem ready to tackle the biggest problem of recent decades -- rising inequality -- it's easy to derail such action in the face of widespread distrust of government.

Maine Sec. of State Charlie Summers

Critics love to beat up on government for its screw-ups and misfires -- as if these mistakes prove the point that the public sector can't do anything right. Exhibit A of late is the failed loan to Solyndra, which has been seized on as evidence that Washington can't create green jobs or do industrial policy more generally.

Economic mobility is a tricky subject and it helps to do your homework before offering opinions in this area. Case in point is the recent speech by House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan at the Heritage Foundation.

Earlier this week, Governor Rick Perry released a tax plan that would further shift the federal tax burden off the wealthy and on to the rest of us.

Listen to anyone talking about Occupy Wall Street and inevitably, rising inequality will emerge as one of the main concerns. And, rightfully so. The United States now has income inequality levels on par with countries like Mexico and Argentina.

While a growing body of research documents the many negative effects of economic inequality, these impacts are not reflected in any national accounting measure. Fortunately, though, there is progress on the state level.

Advocates of low taxes and small government like to say that America's economy -- and our society -- works best when individuals and businesses direct how the nation's wealth is used, and government's hands are kept far from the tiller. The genuis of the market, it is said, is that myriad decisions based on self-interest produce outcomes that maximize overall prosperity and well-being.

One enduring mystery of the Republican Party's extreme anti-tax position is who they are speaking for? Does any substantial swath of the American public really oppose tax increases so much that they want this option completely off the table as a means for taming the deficit?

Republican leaders in Congress like to talk about the need to foster more economic "certainty" and "reassure" the markets. Just yesterday, for example, House Speaker John Boehner appealed for cutting social insurance programs on the grounds that "Nothing – nothing – would send a more reassuring message to the markets than taking bipartisan steps to fix the structural problems in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security."

One enduring mystery of the Republican Party's extreme anti-tax position is who they are speaking for? Does any substantial swath of the American public really oppose tax increases so much that they want this option completely off the table as a means for taming the deficit?