"As goes the South, so goes the nation." - W.E.B. DuBois. With the nation's eyes on party conventions in Tampa and Charlotte, the media is cramming to get a handle on the Southern political landscape. The resulting punditry has ranged from thoughtful analysis of changes in the South to rants blaming the region for all (or most) of the nation's ills.

Sister Simone Campbell, whose social justice organization, Network, sponsored the Nuns on the Bus tour protesting the Republican budget, gave Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan the what-for from the podium of Wednesday night's Democratic National Convention, leading my colleague, Joshua Holland, to tweet that she had rapped Ryan's knuckles. Ryan set himself up for the ire of the kind of nuns who minister to the poor when he tried to wrap his draconian budget in the magisterium of Mother Church.

Proudly liberal activist Tim Carpenter, who toiled in Orange County for more than 20 years before resettling in Massachusetts and co-founding Progressive Democrats of America, has made a career of standing staunchly to the left of mainstream Democrats, relentlessly beckoning and cajoling others to come a little closer.

Conservatives force the deficit issue, ignoring job creation, and insisting that tax increases on the rich wouldn't generate enough revenue to balance the budget. They're way off. But it takes a little arithmetic to put it all together. In the following analysis, data has been taken from a variety of sources, some of which may overlap or slightly disagree, but all of which lead to the conclusion that withheld revenue, not excessive spending, is the problem.