I disagree with Hightower.

What you will find here is: a centrist's view of current events;
a collection of thoughts, arguments, and observations
that I have found appealing and/or amusing over the years;
and, if you choose, your civil contributions which will make it into a conversation.

He not busy bein' born, is busy dyin'. - Bob Dylan

Please refer to participants only by their designated identities.

suggestion for US citizens: When a form asks for your race, write in: -- American

Friday, July 20, 2012

Tea Party, But Only For The Deserving


I have written a long post and so I decided to save the site manager's space and post it to another website and just link it. 
I Have No Issue With The Tea Party...Well, Yes I Do
Posted by Bruce at 4:58 PM
Labels:

2 comments:

  1. UnknownJuly 21, 2012 at 4:05 PM

    Wow. That was quite a post. I will need at least two tries to respond to it.
    Since you ended with a whole paragraph about expecting people to pick out an unimportant part and talking about that, I am reluctant to talk about any particular point. If you would provide a short list of what you consider to be the important points, I’m sure someone will respond to them.
    Apparently your remarks were inspired by the previous post about Dionne and Stewart. The tea party was incidental in that post. I was only suggesting that, as the government grows, people feel less and less obligation to community. For example, once you have a good publicly funded fire department it is reasonable to expect the volunteer one to disband.

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownJuly 22, 2012 at 1:10 AM

    You began: “I have no issue with the Tea Party's great concern, even rabid anger, over the country's runaway spending.” I assume that your topic sentence was not a minor point.
    What exactly does that mean? Does it mean that you agree that we have a serious problem with debt? That we not only have the admitted 15 trillion dollar debt, but also the unfunded mandates for decades of pensions, medicare, etc. Does it mean that you will support serious measures to deal with it? Does it mean that you are willing to cut back on those social programs to get things back in balance? (A real cut back, not one of those “cuts” where you project a 12% increase and then “cut back 3%” so that the actual change is a 9% increase.)

    That is what has gotten many of us, who are not by any means tea partiers ourselves, to have sympathy with them on this point.

    They are scared.

    In the face of that, our president has led us in making a huge increase in the Fed’s obligations (ACA) with not even a nod at dealing with the real problem of paying for it. Subsequently, he is now proposing a small tax on the rich which may be good politics but will only pay for about 5% of the current deficit without even thinking about the unfunded mandates. The other thing he is doing is having the Treasury sell bonds to the Federal Reserve. That is a cute way of “printing money”.

    They don't understand it all, but they sense that the government has been dealing fast and loose with the money. They are right and they have good reason to be scared.

    When people who are not as sophisticated as you are get scared, then they sometimes act badly.

    But when it really hits the fan there will be a lot of other people acting badly too.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)