The President needs to deliver the same message to the public, loudly and clearly. The biggest problems we face are unemployment, stagnant wages, slow growth, and widening inequality — not deficits. The major goal must be to get jobs and wages back, not balance the budget.

Paul Ryan’s budget plan — essentially, the House Republican plan — is designed to lure the White House and Democrats, and the American public, into a debate over how to balance the federal budget in ten years, not over whether it’s worth doing.

“This is an invitation,” Ryan explained when he unveiled the plan Tuesday. “Show us how to balance the budget. If you don’t like the way we’re proposing to balance our budget, how do you propose to balance the budget?”

Until now the President has seemed all too willing to engage in that debate. His ongoing talk of a “grand bargain” to reduce the budget deficit has played directly into Republican hands.

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Apple store workers, he wrote, make up a large majority of Apple's US workforce — 30,000 out of 43,000 employees in this country — and they make about $25,000 a year, or about $12 an hour.

Lawrence Mishel at the Economic Policy Institute notes that's just a dollar above the federal poverty level. This for a company that paid nine of its top executives a total of $441 million in 2011.

“The discrepancy between Apple’s profits/executive pay and its compensation to its workers is a particularly glaring example of what is occurring in the wider economy,” Mishel writes.

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