Posted on 07/28/2011 12:39:15 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
It’s hard to say if the Tea Party has an acknowledged leader, but someone who professes to be just that has chosen a very opportune moment to trash Speaker John Boehner’s attempts to craft legislation that would allow an increase in the debt ceiling. Judson Phillips, the CEO of Tea Party Nation, is the self-acknowledged head of the Tea Party, and in an editorial this morning in The Washington Post, he attacks Boehner’s legislation for providing “almost non-existent budget cuts.”
Phillips says:
As the founder of Tea Party Nation, I feel confident in saying that the Tea Party understands what so many in Washington seem to have forgotten: We do not have a debt crisis. We have a spending crisis. There is only one way you get to a debt crisis — you spend too much money.
Here is what is fundamentally wrong and dangerous with the core assumption of the Tea Party: There are two ways to get to a debt crisis – you either spend too much money or you don’t take in enough revenue. Anyone who has done a family budget or a business budget understands there are two sides to every discussion of cash flow: cash flow in, and cash flow out. In government terms, this equates to taxes received and expenditures made.
By taking one half of this equation out of the discussion, the Tea Party is dragging the nation along on a fantasy ride in which only spending cuts are allowed as a solution to the government’s debt problem. The danger in an approach which demands enormous budget cuts - $4 trillion is the number mentioned by the Tea Party – is that you expose the economy to a depressionary shock, especially since the Tea Party wants the cuts immediately. Immediate cuts of that size would be the equivalent of removing 25% of all cash flow out of the economy, throwing tens of millions of middle class Americans into acute financial stress. For many poor people, it would be an existential crisis, in which starvation becomes a real prospect.
What sort of person would deliberately ignore the obvious fundamental reality of any budget? Tea Partiers have been called crazy, “nutters”, reckless, irresponsible, and just plain stupid. I suspect they have bought into a partisan set of talking points that have been dogma for many years in the Republican Party. First, all taxes are bad, because they steal money from hard-working people and deprive businesses of the means of creating jobs. Second, government spending is generally bad because it makes people indolent and dependent on hand-outs. Third, deficits are bad because they stifle economic growth.
Tea Partiers are obviously creatures of the Republican Party. Fifty of them sit on the Republican side of the aisle in the House of Representatives. They pride themselves on attracting someone like Sarah Palin as a keynote speaker at their conferences. They get funding from right-wing special interest groups. They are partisan in their approach to politics, excoriating liberals and Democrats, and eager to push the Republican Party into their imaginary world where all government deficit problems can be solved simply by cutting and capping expenditures. In his editorial, Judson Phillips ascribes all of the spending problems to the “Obama-Pelosi-Reid axis of fiscal evil.” What happened to George W. Bush and his $300 billion annual tax cut, his unfunded wars, his drug company give-away, and his bailout of the banking industry? You are no longer dealing in fantasy when you ignore the president and party who in 2000 inherited a budget surplus and converted it into a $1 trillion+ deficit.
Party hack though he is, Mr. Phillips makes some good points about waste and fraud in the federal budget. These points are lost, however, in his one-sided mind set: he takes only the Republican side in the politics of the deficit debate, and then he requires that we look only at the spending side in the budgetary calculus. We could say that his approach helps no one, but in point of fact there are some beneficiaries, namely all the people who have direct access and influence with Congress so that they can get their taxes cut at the exclusion of everybody else. That would be wealthy people, and large corporations.
As much as the Tea Party likes to fancy itself as independent, it has become the radical wing of the Republican Party. It would be bad enough if the only thing the Tea Party might accomplish would be pulling the Republican Party to the fringe of radical conservatism, but it is doing more than that. It is holding the Republican Party hostage to its immensely dangerous concept that the only solution available to the federal deficit is to cut spending. The Republican Party in turn is holding the country hostage over the same profoundly simple error – that taxes cannot be raised as a matter of principle. When one party in a two-party system perpetuates and insists on such an appalling error, the people who are going to get hurt are the 99% of the population who no longer are represented in the Congress.
Oh hell just let ‘em raise taxes....the resulting 15% unemployment ought to be fun to watch Obama try to explain in October 2012.
The part that permits you to retain your testicles.
The problem is that the little people have too much money and freedom.
We on the left have a solution for that problem.
But the ignorant little people dare to fight us.
/sarc(?)
The blacks could be 100% unemployed, they’d still vote for him en masse.
This assumes the money not taken and spent by the government will not be spent by its rightful owners, the folks who earned it.
Well- there’s five minutes I’ll never get back. The author offers more straw men than you’d find in a million acres of corn.
[Oh hell just let ‘em raise taxes....the resulting 15% unemployment ought to be fun to watch Obama try to explain in October 2012.]
I am at the point where I agree with you, i am prepared, I am ready, I am resourceful and smart, and I WILL survive.
Maybe we should adopt a stand of: “Let’s walk down the path of darkness together”
Because when we finally get to the light at the other side of the scary forest the socialist scum, and state sponsored leeches will have died off in the woods.
We ARE “Taxed Enough Already” and this is a barfbag article, but an abrupt 25% reduction of cash flow to the economy will lead to an economic meltdown.
But, but, they won’t spend it the right way! Plus, the malt liquor, cognac, small cigar and cigarette industries might collapse. Think of all those dope dealers with mouths to feed!
I'll let the left's favorite 'partisan democrat' address these items seriatim:
First: "The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not." -- Thomas Jefferson
Second: "If we can prevent the government from wasting the labor of the people, under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy." AND "To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical." AND "I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious." -- Thomas Jefferson
Third: "I place economy among the first and most important virtues, and public debt as the greatest of dangers to be feared. To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt." AND "I hope a tax will be preferred [to a loan which threatens to saddle us with a perpetual debt], because it will awaken the attention of the people and make reformation and economy the principle of the next election. The frequent recurrence of this chastening operation can alone restrain the propensity of governments to enlarge expense beyond income." -- Thomas Jefferson
So yes, I'm "guilty". I have "bought in" to the "partisan" Thomas Jefferson's "talking points". But better his than those of Barack Obama, George Soros, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Karl Marx, eh Mr. Numerian?.
They want to talk about rolling back to FY2000 percentage of GDP for the federal budget? I'm all for it. But they don't... The constant whine is that the rich keep getting richer.
Well, yes, stupid, they do. If I have a million dollars in the bank and invest only 100k of it during a year, even if you set capital gains at 100%, I'm still going to have a million dollars at the end of the year. But if there's little to no capital gains tax, there's more incentive for me to risk my money to try to make more. Either way, I'm still going to be the ‘rich getting richer’, but one way, you collapse investment, the other you expand it.
Time for these liberals to pony up a number. What percentage of the GDP should the federal government consume...?
We're waiting.
The Tea Party knows that to increase revenue by increasing taxes will cause a slow down of the recovery phase of the economy.
The way the “Tea Party” has been so kindly bandied about in media makes me think that there is a HUGE group of people that are quietly becoming more resolved to the idea that these people of the socialist left are just plain evil.
Unfortunately, seems that the socialist left has a lot of members that seem to squeal loudly and spin relentlessly in the game of control/politics.
Can politicians and pundits really get away with calling so many of us idiots and racists?
“There are two ways to get to a debt crisis – you either spend too much money or you don’t take in enough revenue.”
####
This clown is simply angling for a compromise, shuffling down the inevitable road to economic oblivion. And make no mistake there is no fast talking, obfuscation or politicking that is going to save us when the market-driven, economic hammer finally comes down.
There is PLENTY of revenue. Way too much in fact.
Spending at an utterly irresponsible, insane level is the ONLY problem and where ALL of the repair work needs to be directed.
“We ARE “Taxed Enough Already” and this is a barfbag article, but an abrupt 25% reduction of cash flow to the economy will lead to an economic meltdown.”
Let’s see, the federal government is borrowing 100 billion a month, so if the government stopped borrowing 100 billion a month cash flow would drop by 25%, well it seems to me that money put in treasuries is not going in to the economy or into products that people want, but is employing people that make rules to prevent you from exercising your economic freedom. It seems to me that that money would go into the productive economy.
Do I hear "2"?
money put in treasuries is not going in to the economy or into products that people want,
>> If the interest rate goes up (which of course it will from a ratings downgrade or default) taxpayers will be holding the bag for the higher rates of interest on treasuries, on top of the current debt.
It seems to me that that money would go into the productive economy.
>> Eventually, if there was anything left after the bankruptcies and riots. We need a systematic and continuous approach to spending reduction rather than an abrupt meltdown.
“The way the “Tea Party” has been so kindly bandied about in media makes me think that there is a HUGE group of people that are quietly becoming more resolved to the idea that these people of the socialist left are just plain evil.”
What do you _do_ with “evil”?
Do you compromise with it?
Again, what do you do with the evil?
Just wonderin’....
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