Lindsey Graham: The Tea Party Movement 'Will Die Out'

Major doesn't have that attitude, but I'm pretty sure you're quite ignorant.

 

Really? Because I said:

The populist idea worked exceedingly well in Greece.

And you responded:

Actually it has worked fairly well.


Are you now saying they didn't get it right? Please, feel free to explain your position on Greece. Their setup was basically a result of populism gone wild - lots of government services, low taxes, etc.

 

I don't view Greece's debt problem as purely or even mainly the result of populism. As has been discussed it is mainly the problems of elites not paying their taxes, and the elites of Germany and Greece overborrowing or over lending. Generally speaking these lenders and borrowers were not populist run amok. Eitists and policy wonks did it.

Now I'll do somewhat of a non-sequitur, too. Do you believe the financial crisis in the US was mainly the result of low income borrowers (populism) running amok and buying houses they couldn't afford?

 

Graham has to sell popular opinion based on polls and incrementally build up its support to promote it. Tea Partiers don't work that way. They already are each other's support and don't need polls to feel they represent the common citizens' interests.

Tea Party movement in its current form will subside. I do think there is a 2nd wave of adopters that wont call themselves Tea Partiers necessarily, but who have equal dissatisfaction with seemingly out of touch leaders and policies

 

Populism is absolutely relevant to this. Yes the rich are evading taxes but that's been a problem that predates the greek crisis by decades and is separate to the current crisis. Greece's problem was joining the Eurozone and having access to loans with interest rates that were completely out of whack with its economy. Instead of borrowing based on the strength of its economy, it was now borrowing on the strength of the Eurozone as a whole. So now you had a country with new found access to billions it previously wouldnt even dream of touching because of past interest rates.

Now what did they do with that money? The government caved into populist demands by substantially increasing pensions, increasing things like vacation time, medical and financial benefits, etc.. This new found money in turn created a mini economic boom in Greece. The economic growth in Greece since joining the Eurozone has actually been rather substantial but the problem was that it was built on false money. Greece wasnt producing wealth it was simply borrowing it and had no way to pay it off.

And now you're seeing the end result of a government that has to slash many of the promises it made with the money it borrowed. It caved into the type of economic populism that you described and now its paying the price. That's not to say that government safety nets arent fine but in Greece's case it was built on a system of bad loans that came crumbling down.

No I think its silly to point the blame solely at the homeowners. Yes they took out bad mortgages but mortgage houses, banks, traders, etc.. all built a housing market on a house of cards. Not to mention we had a government and companies that tried to do everything in there power to incentivize home ownership even when it made no financial sense.

 

No - not at all. The housing crisis in the US actually started in the high-end speculative housing on the coasts. The CRA and things like that actually were some of the last mortgages to topple. Even subprime loans in general weren't THAT bad - they have higher interest rates because they are supposed to have higher default rates, so that's accounted for.

Where the US went wrong was more in financial speculation and the repackaging of mortgages, creating a disconnect between the risk taker (the lender) and the people ultimately penalized (whoever bought the MBS). Low income borrowers were sucked into the bubble of rising home prices, but they were more a symptom that aggravated the problem than a cause here.

In the Greece thing, I think geeimsobored summarized what I think fairly well.

 

No of course not. The elites of Greece were the reason they joined the EU. I agree 100% that the average person in any EU state was locked out of the accession process entirely.

That's not the "story" of the financial elite. That is what happened. This has nothing to do with the "elite" of Greece hating pensions. Giving out benefits to the average worker is in the interest of every politician. It gets you votes, period. You're just speculating without any evidence. Besides your argument doesnt even make any sense. These were loans made BY the government. Unless you run some autocratic state with no oversight you usually cant get away with loaning money and then buying real estate. If you're going to speculate like this come up with some evidence first.

No that's not why the rest of the world collapsed. The economic collapse had nothing to do with countries running massive deficits. It started with an overvalued housing market, a series of terrible mortgages that could consequently not get paid, and the US exporting said terrible loans to the rest of the world in the form of derivative packages.

Greece on the other hand did suffer because of the global collapse but the collapse also exposed its shoddy accounting and loans. When the economy collapsed banks took a closer look at their loans and a country like Greece that was paying off interest on loans with new loans basically got burned.

Of course pensions existed before the Eurozone. The point is that they were expanded substantially afterwards. Greece was one of the fastest growing economies in Europe in the last decade. Europe had little no growth since the beginning of the millenium yet Greece was outperforming the continent. This was because of excessive borrowing and spending on social benefits.

Dont get me wrong, the motives of the Greek government made sense. Greece was ruled by a military junta for years that consistently ignored the needs of average people. The Greek standard of living was out of whack for the region and was much lower than it should be. And the new democratic governments made it a point to put money into new social programs to help boost the standard of living as well as to gain popular support for their respective parties.

The problem is that in order to sustain this they lied about their deficits for years. They lied about it to get into the Eurozone and then lied several more times to meet minimum EU standards on deficits (and they didnt actually meet them since no country actually does, they just wanted to look less terrible)

Dont get me wrong about this. The leaders of Greece screwed over their country by lying about their budgets and overborrowing, but at the same time do not pretend that the Greek system of social services and safety nets are out of control. Safety nets are fine but you have to use some reasonable level of accounting and honesty and when you have public pressures to ramp up safety nets (to get votes basically) in a country that has little transparency, stuff like this happens.

 

I can agree with much of this.

 

As a libertarian I'm not the biggest fan of the Tea Party he mentions. Yeah, it'll die out, as do all 3rd party like movements. All that matters is what impact they have on the political playing field...I will say this though:
"Lindsey Graham Will Die Out"
and a lot of people will be better off for it.

 

My first memory of Lindsey Graham was as the sanctimonious floor leader for the attempted impeachment of Clinton. He continually pretended to be like a shocked school girl that the president had a blow joband lied about it.

Meanwhile no shock for Graham when Bush lied and 5,000 Americans and 500,000 Iraqis died.

 

Interestingly, he was the only Republican in the House to vote against any of the articles of impeachment (he voted against one of the four).

 

Typical for this McCain (I'm a fake maverick )clone.