What's the official tea party view on budget cuts to entitlement programs?

Which tea party?

 

I kinda see the Republicans playing the role of Hoover during the Great Depression. In a backwards kinda of mentality, they are doing the opposite of what the market needs. Playing with fire.

The fundamental issue when you look at the current business environment is that companys are sitting on TONS of CASH. Trillions in fact. Their stocks are up and doing well. The rich have recovered a lot of what they lost.

Problem is there is no hiring because consumer demand remains weak because they don't have jobs. It's that darn chicken and the egg thing. Nothing to spur growth.

Cutting taxes for the Rich don't help because they aren't spending enough. Cut their taxes 10% but of that hardly any goes into spending.

What we need is to spur consumer spending in the middle class somehow to give corporations to start hiring and put us on an upward business cycle. One unemployment drops down to 6% then you start cutting spending and re-raising taxes.

 

Did you know that many of the public works programs that allegedly helped pull the U.S. out of the Great Depression were started under the Hoover administration? In many ways, President Roosevelt's administration simply went further with the programs that President Hoover's administration started. Seems like this is a pretty common misconception.

 

Wow - if you even think that there's a chance that this is in the foreseeable future, you are really drinking the Kool-aid.

I think the view of the average tea-partier is that entitlement programs that encourage people to not be responsible for their own welfare shut be cut sharply and then phased out altogether. Giving people money does them much more harm than good in the long run. I don't understand why the "compassionate" progressives don't see this.

From the richest trust-fund babies to the multi-generational poor, it has never been so clear that giving people something without making them work for it is destructive.

Shoot, if we just found a way to make 75% of the people on welfare work for it, we could re-introduce manufacturing and call center jobs back into this country.

 

How many people do you think are happy with what unemployment gives them?

Unemployment is more of a safety net.

I got Know two people who went to ivy league schools who either don't have a job or doing something that would require no real educations.

 

I would guess . . . most people don't know their party's stance on most things.

What are the CORE beliefs of the two main partys?
They seem to get obscured and change from time to time. . . reinterpretted i guess.

Rocket River

 

honestly. only a handful of the tea party guys are real. People like Bachman, Palin are as fake as hell. I would say 90% of the tea party people don't have real integrity. You can look at the Patriot act renewal bill as an example. Only a handful of tea party guys voted against it.

 

It's not a matter of compassion but fundamental economics. the receivers of entitlement programs will spend the money they get almost immediately - which is like fuel injection for the economy.

If you cut entitlements you take that away, but since our deficit is borne in a big part from tax cuts, you've essentially swapped one for the other. And tax cuts are not as effective in stimulating the economy as stimulus dollars past a certain point - once we passed sometime around 1996.

Most of the receivers of entitlements are the old and retired...putting them back to work isn't a realistic option. The truth of the matter is, it's not the poor who is putting the stress on the system, it's the aging.

Remember to collect unemployment or social security - you had to have paid into it.

 

My biggest beef is with welfare, not social security or unemployment. But to be perfectly honest, I couldn't tell you which of those three costs us the most.

Government jobs are another type of entitlement, but they only really kill us when you combine working for the government with unions. That's a big part of what is bankrupting California.

 

While I agree with your general sentiment, it is social security that is really going to bankrupt us. It is basically a Ponzi scheme at this point. The young people paying in now have no hope of getting paid their fair share in the future because there are too many old people now pulling money out of the pot.

The most effective way to fix social security is to reduce benefits for the soon to retire and move to required contributions to an individual retirement account. That way, the individual can only receive what they contributed plus returns. It makes no sense to throw everyone into one big pot. People have different risk tolerances and goals besides the fact that irresponsible politicians keep pulling from social security to pay for their pet projects.

 

Sounds good to me. I think what they are going to be forced to do is raise the retirement age though. They didn't expect so many people to be living this long when they started the program.

 

I disagree with your conclusions regarding fixing Social Security. The fix is two-fold but simple. First, take the cap off Social Security salary contributions and, second, remove Social Security from the General Fund.

I don't blame younger citizens in fearing Social Security will not be available when they retire when Congress spends the reserves every year with a promise of replacing the funds with seriously inflation-riddled dollars.

 

Because of the truths we look at as opposed to the hype. Most recipients of welfare are elderly. That is a fact. Are you upset because they aren't out there working? Would that really save us money to have a huge increase in health care spending because the elderly went back to work once they stopped getting any welfare, and had huge health issues as a result?

The largest cost of welfare is health care. Again we are dealing with sick people. Would you put in-firmed back to work? Again work production goes down and we have even more health care costs and expenses.

That's the truth. Yes, it is also true that there are some people who cheat the system and collect govt. assistance they don't need. But if you think that punishing the majority because a small minority cheats is the right option, then it will take a lot of convincing.

 

Exactly. The "TEA Party" is a hodgepodge of different groups, each with their own alliances and goals. Trying to nail down the "TEA Party position" on anything is like trying to nail Jell-o to the wall.

 

Welfare is less than 6% of the federal budget.

 

This is a common misconception that just isn't accurate. There are certainly lots of aging baby boomers who will flood SS in the near future, but even with these people, SS is solvent until 2037 if we do nothing at all.

The most effective way to fix SS is with two tweaks, means testing benefits and lifting the cap on payroll tax contributions. Making these two changes push SS solvency out to 2075.