[Vision2020] Tea Party’s War on America

Tue Aug 2 11:01:03 PDT 2011

The “Tea Party” is simply the grass-roots movement stemmed from the far right… just as the “Progressive” movement stems from the far left.  

Personally, I don’t believe that standing up and demanding that the government stop expanding/spending/ballooning/taxing/infringing (etc etc) warrants the nametag much of the public likes to pin on them (racists?  And now comparisons to terrorists?)  In all fairness, I don’t assume that Tea Party folks are racist terrorists out to destroy America any more than I believe that all Progressives are dope-smoking tree-huggers that want a totalitarian socialist regime… both sterotypes serve only to distract.

I lean far right as it is.  Like I’ve said before, the further out towards the fringes you go on the bell-curve, the more you look like a crazy from the other side.

The biggest problem the Tea Party faces is one of IMAGE, not MESSAGE.  And (my personal opinion) is that by allowing buffoons like Michele Bachman or Sara Palin to sidle up and cheer in their spotlight isn’t helping the cause or the message.  

---

Debt limit:  I’ve gotten into heated debates about this before… I personally don’t believe we should be raising the debt ceiling at all.   We’re bankrupt as a nation… it’s really only a question of whether you want us to wake up NOW and realize it, or whether you want us to wake up in 2013 and realize it.  Either way… we’re bankrupt.  

“OH MY GOD!  WE’LL SEND THE NATION INTO ITS FIRST DEFAULT!”

First, we should clear some misconceptions… the U.S. Government doesn’t really have a traditional bank account like you or I do… they have SPENDING POLICY.  The government isn’t going to “run out of money” on August 2nd, they will simply have crossed a line where incoming tax receipts will no longer be able to cover outgoing expenses.   It’s not that EVERYONE won’t get paid… it’s that SOMETHING can’t get paid.  

It’s at THAT point where SOMETHING (well, MANY SOMETHINGS) has to go… my own opinion is that the ONLY way to get the attention of a mule is to whack it with a 2X4 (that’s just a mental picture… I don’t actually advocate hitting animals with timber)… our government has shown TIME AND TIME AGAIN that when given the option to solve this major issue, they will instead take the EASY path and punt down road.  

We’re out of money… OK, get another credit card. 

We’re out of money… OK, we’ll solve it tomorrow, get another credit card.

We’re out of money… OK, now is not the time to cut spending, get another credit card.

We’re out of money… OK, there’s no way we can cut funding to (Project Widget)… get another credit card.

Name your time period.  Name your circumstance… over the past 50 years, it falls into the same pattern.  “BORROW MONEY NOW, WORRY ABOUT IT LATER…”

I have heard from those that simply want to “do this smartly, and not do anything stupid by rushing into a process…”.  I personally believe that you should substitute the words “painless” and “painful” for “smart” and “stupid”… and realize that we are well beyond the point where anything in the this process will be painless.   There are no more “painless” options. 

I have heard from those that want to give the government more time by raising the debt ceiling.  I personally don’t believe that “if ONLY we gave our government more time we would become fiscally responsible…”, or that “THIS time it will be different…”

I have heard from those that say “we can’t possibly cap the borrowing limit NOW.”  I personally believe that this argument has probably rung out EVERY SINGLE TIME we have wanted to take on more debt (though how LOUDLY probably varies over the years).  If not NOW, when?  Tomorrow?  Next year?  

I have heard from those that say “we need to raise taxes and make big corporations (and rich) pay their fair share to solve the debt problem”.  Fine.  Raise the taxes.  In fact, take EVERY SINGLE PENNY OF PROFIT generated by the Fortune 500 companies for the past year (destroying, of course, the revenue generators and job creators in the process), and you won’t have even scratched the surface of how large our nation’s debt is.  

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2011/full_list/index.html

I have heard from those that say “it’s (insert President name) who created this mess!”.  Yes… you’re all correct… every administration has been raising the debt limit for decades.  George W?  Sure.  Obama?  Sure.  Reagan?  Sure.  Johnson?  Sure.  If you want to get off on a tangent about “who raised more when and for what reason”, fine… it’s all moot… when we’re all done stamping our feet, we’ll be right back where we are now… with a 14T (soon to become around 17T) in national debt.  

And (as I write this) we see that our government will (again) set up some sort of “bi-partisan commission” to study the problem and come up with recommendations… that (as history shows us), will flatly be ignored when our politicians once again are deluded into thinking that there is “smart” (painless) solution, if only a committee would discover it.  

NOT raising the debt ceiling is the ONLY WAY to FORCE everyone to come to the table and make concessions from ALL sides… you HAVE to remove the (false) luxury of time.   Then (and only then) will we as a nation stop digging our financial grave.  

DEFAULT is already upon us.  It’s just a matter of NOW or LATER.

Now… before everyone comes out with pitchforks and says something to the effect of “Oh, I suppose you’re going to want to cut Medicare and keep defense spending”.  

There CAN’T BE ANY “sacred cows”.  NONE.  Pull the troops out of our foreign wars.  Close down bases.  Cut welfare.  Cut farming subsidies.  Cut Medicare.  

WE CAN’T AFFORD IT ALL… but dismiss the illusions that cuts to any SINGLE program will solve the problems we currently have.  Raising taxes alone won’t do it.  Cutting Medicare alone won’t do it.  Cutting defense alone won’t do it.  IT *ALL* HAS TO BE DONE.

EVERYONE has a “but what about…” counter-point to spending cuts.  EVERYONE.  EVERYONE has a “you can’t cut our nation’s ‘WIDGET PROGRAM’ because it will be disastrous to the nation’s WIDGET POPULATION!”.  

But NOT raising the debt limit will be the ONLY way to get our leaders to FINALLY come to the table and start discussing our nations SPENDING PRIORITIES instead of just kicking the can down the road.  YES, it will be disastrous.  YES, it will be financially hard.  YES, it will be PAINFUL.  

BUT IT MUST BE DONE.

(Ok… take out your pitchforks… )

Jay

From: vision2020-bounces at moscow.com [mailto:vision2020-bounces at moscow.com] On Behalf Of Art Deco
Sent: Tuesday, August 02, 2011 8:49 AM
To: Moscow Vision 2020
Subject: [Vision2020] Tea Party’s War on America

<http://www.nytimes.com/>   <http://www.nytimes.com/>  <http://www.nytimes.com/> 

·  

________________________________

August 1, 2011

Tea Party’s War on America

By JOE NOCERA <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/columns/josephnocera/?inline=nyt-per> 

You know what they say: Never negotiate with terrorists. It only encourages them. 

These last few months, much of the country has watched in horror as the Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people. Their intransigent demands for deep spending cuts, coupled with their almost gleeful willingness to destroy one of America’s most invaluable assets, its full faith and credit, were incredibly irresponsible. But they didn’t care. Their goal, they believed, was worth blowing up the country for, if that’s what it took. 

Like ideologues everywhere, they scorned compromise. When John Boehner, the House speaker, tried to cut a deal <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/26/us/politics/26deal.html?_r=1>  with President Obama that included some modest revenue increases, they humiliated him. After this latest agreement was finally struck <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/01/us/politics/01FISCAL.html>  on Sunday night — amounting to a near-complete capitulation by Obama — Tea Party members went on Fox News to complain that it only called for $2.4 trillion in cuts, instead of $4 trillion. It was head-spinning. 

All day Monday, the blogosphere and the talk shows mused about which party would come out ahead politically. Honestly, who cares? What ought to matter is not how these spending cuts will affect our politicians, but how they’ll affect the country. And I’m not even talking about the terrible toll $2.4 trillion in cuts will take on the poor and the middle class. I am talking about their effect on America’s still-ailing economy. 

America’s real crisis is not a debt crisis. It’s an unemployment crisis. Yet this agreement not only doesn’t address unemployment, it’s guaranteed to make it worse. (Incredibly, the Democrats even abandoned their demand for extended unemployment benefits as part of the deal.) As Mohamed El-Erian, the chief executive of the bond investment firm Pimco, told me, fiscal policy includes both a numerator and a denominator. “The numerator is debt,” he said. “But the denominator is growth.” He added, “What we have done is accelerate forward, in a self-inflicted manner, the numerator. And, in the process, we have undermined the denominator.” Economic growth could have gone a long way toward shrinking the deficit, while helping put people to work. The spending cuts will shrink growth and raise the likelihood of pushing the country back into recession. 

Inflicting more pain on their countrymen doesn’t much bother the Tea Party Republicans, as they’ve repeatedly proved. What is astonishing is that both the president and House speaker are claiming that the deal will help the economy. Do they really expect us to buy that? We’ve all heard what happened in 1937 when Franklin Roosevelt, believing the Depression was over, tried to rein in federal spending <http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/12/are-we-about-to-repeat-the-mistakes-of-1937/> . Cutting spending spiraled the country right back into the Great Depression, where it stayed until the arrival of the stimulus package known as World War II. That’s the path we’re now on. Our enemies could not have designed a better plan to weaken the American economy than this debt-ceiling deal. 

One thing Roosevelt did right during the Depression was legislate into being a social safety net to soften the blows that a free-market economy can mete out in tough times. During this recession, it’s as if the government is going out of its way to make sure the blows are even more severe than they have to be. The debt-ceiling debate reflects a harsher, less empathetic America. It’s sad to see. 

My own view is that Obama should have played the 14th Amendment card <http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/debt-limit-standoff-top-democrats-revive-14th-amendment-option-to-raise-ceiling/2011/07/29/gIQAnsr2hI_story.html> , using its language about “the validity of the public debt” to unilaterally raise the debt ceiling. Yes, he would have infuriated the Republicans, but so what? They already view him as the Antichrist. Legal scholars believe that Congress would not have been able to sue to overturn his decision. Inexplicably, he chose instead a course of action that maximized the leverage of the Republican extremists. 

Assuming the Senate passes the bill on Tuesday, the debt ceiling will be a nonissue until after the next election. But the debilitating deficit battles are by no means over. Thanks to this deal, a newly formed super committee of Congress is supposed to target another $1.2 trillion to $1.5 trillion in cuts by late November. If those cuts don’t become law by Dec. 23, automatic across-the-board cuts will be imposed, including deep reductions in defense spending. 

As has been explained ad nauseam, the threat of defense cuts is supposed to give the Republicans an incentive to play fair with the Democrats in the negotiations. But with our soldiers still fighting in Afghanistan, which side is going to blink if the proposed cuts threaten to damage national security? Just as they did with the much-loathed bank bailout, which most Republicans spurned even though financial calamity loomed, the Democrats will do the responsible thing. Apparently, that’s their problem. 

For now, the Tea Party Republicans can put aside their suicide vests. But rest assured: They’ll have them on again soon enough. After all, they’ve gotten so much encouragement. 

__________________________________

Wayne A. Fox
wayne.a.fox at gmail.com

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