First of all this is a poor choice of words for what you are trying to say. Secondly it isn't that a minority group are enslaved or blindly following anyone. It is demeaning and insulting to accuse a group of not voting based on issues important to them. Let's look at the kind of attention voters with civil rights issues have been getting. http://www.rawstory.com/news/2008/DOJ_Civil_Rights_lawyer_sent_racist_0114.html That's right. The last GOP administration appointed a blatant racist to head the civil rights division of the department of justice. So don't give me crap about black Americans being "enslaved" to the Democratic party.
I’m glad you amended your post thumbs, but it does give us a glance into the mindset of the people who attended these rallies. Again, as has been stated before, I don’t think these rallies were really about people being concerned with fiscal policy more than having a problem with who’s president.
That could have been Freudian, but I didn't mean it the way it sounded. I was just trying to get out a brief report and conduct business at the same time. As far as your observation about the rallies, my only response is that time will tell. There were some hate-based fringies, but you have my word that, from what I was seeing in the protesters, most of the anger was political, not racist. Moving around was very difficult, but from what I gathered personally, the crowd had as much antipathy for Bush as Obama. Economics IMO is the governing factor in the rallies.
Well then these people need better education. A majority of them have already received a tax cut under the new administration. What is there to protest?
I think the general sentiment is that it's not fair to overburden one group based off of their income status. Although it hasn't happened yet. Also, the money given in the stimulus bill is like money from a credit card, sweet we got 50 billion dollars! Wait, we'll have to pay it back at some time?
So again I ask, where was the concern over all this spending 4 or 5 years ago? We’ve wasted almost a trillion dollars on a war and almost the same bailing out big business and wall street but not one word about that. Why?
Found this amusing from Andrew Sullivan: Here's the local paper's summary of the cause: So a protest against government debt actually proposes abolition of several major revenue streams ... and no spending cuts. If you want to know what's wrong with the right, you'd be hard put to express it more acutely. Then there's the agenda in the crowd: http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/04/teabaggers-in-west-virginia.html#more Basically, a protest for protest's sake. No one has a freaking clue what they are protesting or why.
Many conservatives were that angry. But you definitely didn't see protesting in the streets. It can also be argued that spending on a war is vastly different than spending on bad debt. That's my main problem with the spending bills. I don't see how they correct (the mortgage at least) problem. Granted I'm no economist, but it seems like we've done nothing to fix the overwhelming problem of bad debt. We just created more debt to help payoff debt. Arguably that's going to get way out of hand in the future.
So spending on destroying things is better than spending on infrastructure growth and long-term economic improvement? We created more debt to prevent the collapse of the economy, which would cause even bigger long-term problems by reducing tax revenues and increasing social program costs (creating even more debt). The point of the spending wasn't to fix bad debt - it was to prevent the bad debt from causing cascading problems throughout everything else.
The answer: Profligate spending without accounting. Lazy media reporters keep calling this a tax protest -- its actually a spending/deficit protest. Most people don't mind paying taxes. Heck, I don't mind paying taxes. However, its the massive wasteful spending and the enormous debt we have been running up over the last 20-30 years that has awakened and is alarming non-activist, middle class Americans. We sent billions in bailouts to the banks and automakers et al without any accounting. The government doesn't even know where many of those billions went. Then we passed a budget without even looking at it. That scared the people who are turning out for the tea parties as well as many who were too lazy or too busy to attend. That tax cut money is sailing under a false flag. First, it was your money in the first place. Second, protesters like me mightily fear that, in order to finance the massive spending and debt maintenance, the government will be giving me a dollar in one hand and taking three from the other in the form of new, higher taxes. It's like my little sister. When she gets a credit card in the mail, she feels compelled to max it out as soon as possible. Somebody (like me) has to pay for the spending sooner or later. It would just be nice to see that she got something for the money spent, but that almost never happens.
Except middle-class, non-activist normal Americans are: 1. OK with temporary gov't growth: http://www.gallup.com/poll/117523/Americans-Short-Term-Government-Growth.aspx 2. Happy with the tax situation: http://www.gallup.com/poll/117433/Views-Income-Taxes-Among-Positive-1956.aspx 3. Very trusting of the administration to manage the economy http://www.gallup.com/poll/117415/Americans-Confident-Obama-Economy.aspx This was the wakeup of the activist right - not non-activist Americans. It's the right-side version of MoveOn.org type activity.
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And you get mad at me for framing questions? A) The war was hopefully more than about just destroying things. I'm not in favor of it after the fact (monday morning quarterbacking I know, but the idea of preemptive just war is still valid in my opinion). B) I don't have a problem w/ infrastructure growth, that was some of the positives to come out of the bill. We just haven't fixed the real problem, which I maintain a starting point for would be to ban adjustable rate first lien mortgages. There's no need for them. We did more than that though, we basically kept alive banks who have misspent bailout money, and have not really done anything to change the basic elements of bad debt economics. The economy will collapse at some point under this basic scheme. And maybe that's what this bailout did was just buy us time to hopefully come up with a solution. But, arguably, a lot of these banks going down would not have been such a bad thing in my opinion. I'm not for Laissez-faire necessarily, but I think we spent way too much and have not begun to fix the actual problem. Like I said a ban on ARM first liens would have been much more effective step in realizing that goal.
But that was the point. That would have been far more expensive. Letting one tiny investment bank (Lehman Brothers) go cost the world trillions of dollars. Letting Citi or BoA or AIG go would have cost an order of magnitude more for the world. I understand the principle - but the cost would have been borne by hundreds of millions of people who had nothing to do with those mistakes in the form of lost jobs, lost savings, and the complete collapse of world economies. It would have made $700B in bailouts look like a relatively small sum. How is that better?
