Our guest blogger is Adam Jentleson, the Communications and Outreach Director for the Hyde Park Project at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan famously asked America, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”

After eight years of conservative rule, it’s worth posing a similar question – are Americans better off today than they were eight years ago?

As our new memo shows, unless you happen to be a big corporation or make enough money to be in the top percentage of earners, the answer is probably no:

A variety of metrics can be used to judge this question and assess what eight years of conservative policies have wrought. The picture painted here is clear: from job growth to debt, and from income disparity to national poverty indices, the conservative approach of putting big corporations and the very wealthy ahead of the middle class has failed to create prosperity that can be shared by all Americans.

The Wonk Room and ThinkProgress have already documented Sen. Norm Coleman’s (R-MN) embrace of the Neo-Hooverist agenda, after he said that his “plan” to tackle the economic crisis is to “balance the budget in 5 years” and install a variety of spending cuts and freezes.

Last night, during a debate on Minnesota Public Radio (MPR), Coleman doubled down on the Neo-Hoover line when he was asked which item on his agenda he would sacrifice due to the financial crisis. The only “agenda item” that Coleman was able to come up with was congressional pay raises, but he was quick to advocate a five-year spending freeze:

Coleman: You can start with congressional raises. You can put a cap on spending for five years. […]

Moderator: So is there anything that you would be willing to give up in light of the financial situation facing the nation?

Coleman: I’ll give up my raise.

This answer is interesting on two fronts. First, it would appear that Coleman is saying congressional pay raises are part of his platform, though Bob Collins of MPR noted “Technically, I don’t think a raise for himself was on his agenda.” Also, in September, “when a supporter suggested he should push Congress to take no pay increase or per diem increase for the next four years to show solidarity with struggling Americans,” Coleman said members of Congress “deserve a reasonable pay raise but not special treatment.”

The far more important point, though, is that Coleman has not backed down from his spending freeze, even though a host of economists, budget analysts, academics, and lawmakers have said that now is not the time to chill government spending. Indeed, Harvard economist Martin Feldstein wrote last week that “the only way to prevent a deepening recession will be a temporary program of increased government spending.”

Today, in the Washington Post, Robert Rubin and Jared Bernstein became the latest to join the chorus:

[W]e both agree that our economic future also requires public investment in critical areas like education, health care, energy, worker training and much else. [...] [C]ertain public investment can help us meet our fiscal challenges.

Will Norm Coleman come around to supporting increased infrastructure spending, or will he continue to cling to the Hoover agenda?

Our guest bloggers are Robert Gordon and James Kvaal, senior fellows at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

In this weekend’s Wall Street Journal, Alan Reynolds accuses us of being lawyers, not economists. We are guilty as charged. But the rest of Reynolds’ rant is wrong.

Reynolds disputes our organization’s estimate that John McCain’s tax plan is worth $3.8 billion to the five largest American oil companies. He claims that we excluded the oil companies’ deductions and credits from our analysis. But we did include deductions. And though we excluded credits — because they are not publicly available — they would have only increased the size of our estimate.

Our estimate is conservative in other ways as well. It used 2007 profits, even though oil companies are breaking all the records this year. It did not count McCain’s big expansion in deductions for business investment. And it did not include oil companies’ foreign profits.

We analyzed 200 companies last spring, and our results have been featured in millions of dollars worth of advertising. None of these companies have disputed our results. In fact, no one did until Reynolds wrote his column three days before the election.

Reynolds gets the big things wrong as well. There is little reason to think corporate taxes put American businesses at a competitive disadvantage. Corporate tax collections are among the lowest in the world because our code is riddled with special interest deductions, credits and exemptions that shield corporate profits from tax. While corporate tax reform is overdue, John McCain’s plan would drive up the deficit, shift the tax burden onto middle-class wages, and harm the economy.