On the topic of "why get out and vote for Dems for Congress?",

excerpt from the above on "Taxmageddon":

the aftermath of the 2012 election will be unlike any other transition in memory. Election Day is November 6th. Fifty-five days later, on New Year’s Eve, the size and the scope of the federal government are scheduled to be radically altered. Federal tax rates for every income group will shoot up to levels not seen since 2001. Payroll taxes for employees will jump by two percentage points. Unemployment benefits for some three million Americans will be cut off. The Pentagon will start the new year with a fifty-five-billion-dollar budget cut. The budget allocated to everything from the F.B.I. to the Park Service to meat inspections will be slashed by the same amount. Soon after, federal payments to doctors who treat patients using Medicare, the federal health program for the elderly, will be slashed by about a third.

The huge increase in taxes and the precipitate drop in government spending would equal an economic contraction of more than five hundred billion dollars, more than three per cent of G.D.P. The impact could send a fragile economy back into a recession. “It’s two to three times bigger in negative terms than even the biggest year of the stimulus was in positive terms,” Austan Goolsbee, Obama’s former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, said. It is this frightening confluence of fiscal time bombs, starting on December 31, 2012, that has earned the name Taxmageddon.

What’s more, sometime in mid-February the government will reach the limit of its authority to borrow money. If Congress doesn’t raise the debt ceiling, the United States will default on its loans and will no longer be able to pay all its bills—to doctors, defense contractors, Social Security pensioners, Chinese bondholders, and almost anyone else who receives funds from the federal government.

Although the Presidential campaign seems to be dominated by absurd minutiae, such as Romney’s and Obama’s respective treatment of canines and Donald Trump’s theories about the President’s ancestry, at some point this year the debate will focus on the looming fiscal crash. When that happens, the election may end up being a referendum on what to do about it. Obama will need to beat back Romney’s charges that he’s a hapless economic steward, and somehow make the case—unpopular thus far—that the economy’s woes are best treated by raising taxes and spending. Yet, in a quirk of history, a reëlected Obama could suddenly find his best historical opportunity thrust upon him.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/06/18/120618fa_fact_lizza#ixzz1xw1TVpcu