It was summer; a hot, muggy summer in Philadelphia where Virginian Thomas Jefferson presented to the Continental Congress a document which would be a shot heard ‘round the world, a Declaration of Independence. The brave men who signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776 put their lives, liberty and sacred honor at stake for the good of what they believed should be a new nation, one conceived in liberty and where all men were created equal. How do we Americans in 2010 view the Declaration of Independence? Too often, we view the Declaration of Independence only as a part of our past, an historic document that is not relevant to us today. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is time that we declared our independence from those which would have us be satisfied with less than the complete American dream. It is time to reclaim the American Revolution for the good of our country and the good of the world. In the Declaration of Independence, the first principle to recognize in reclaiming the American Revolution is to re-affirm that America is a shared dream, a dream meant for all to share not just a few wealthy individuals or corporations. Our nation faces a fiscal crisis. We spend far more than we take in revenues. A fundamental decision must be made as to how it is we will spread the burden of supporting the American dream, if we wish the dream to endure. A frequently cited statistic by those which would advocate drastic reductions in federal spending is the percentage of debt as a percentage of our nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Frequently, advocates of our nation adopting more “fiscal responsibility” forget that until FY 2011, since 1980, each Republican administration has only increased the percentage of our national debt as a percentage of GDP. Since 1980, each Democratic administration had reduced the percentage of national debt as a percentage of GDP. Of far more importance in preserving the American dream is to examine the percentages of wages as a percentage of GDP. In 2006, Bill Moyers reported that the share of GDP going to wages was at its lowest point since 1947, when the government started measuring such numbers. [More . . . ]