Some corrections seem to be in order here.
I'm just curious about how the Tea Party intends to lower the deficit while cutting spending AND lowering taxes. Cutting spending works while income remains steady. It doesn't work if your net income is still 0. Or in this case negative numbers.
Lowering the deficit in this way works if you cut spending faster than you cut taxes. I should think this would be obvious.
I don't get it. Is there some disconnect where Tea Party members don't know what taxes are for? Do roads just pop into existence? Lights. police, schools, etc?
You're conveniently forgetting everything else that drains the budget. Social security, national defense, interest on the debt, executive departments, etc. are much higher on the list. In fact, many cities are raising taxes
and cutting back on road work, maintenance, etc. because public pensions require such a large share of the pie.
What's hilarious to me is their militant advocacy for undoing the very institutions that keep citizens safe, and I'm not talking about the local public service ones. Imagine the crap we'd get ourselves into if we shut down all the federal government regulatory institutions? They're leaky enough as it is now, but if they just weren't there in the first place... hell, that's what we'd get.
What institutions are you referring to here?
Tea Party's mostly formed by a bunch of poorly-educated white people who hate runaway spending (because Fox told them it was bad), socialists/communists (because the Cold War told them it was bad), and big government (because Glenn Beck told them it was bad).
That's an unsupported generalization, and falls into the soft-serve mudslinging category...
And the one thing I've always found interesting; the Tea Party sat by idly for eight years while Bush expanded the government and absolutely exploded the deficit, but as soon as Obama was elected, they decided it was a problem? (Oh wait...I forgot...Bush was a white Republican...)
This is probably due, in a large part, to the phenomenon Battuta has mentioned previously: people tend to look the other way if the economy is doing all right. However, your premise is incorrect: the opposition started when the recession hit, which was before Obama was elected. Many people forget that the first TARP bill (introduced in the last months of the Bush administration) was voted down due to strong populist opposition, until the politicians caved to the bankers' doomsday scenarios.
I also don't know why everyone's surprised that the TP is turning violent; what did you expect out of a group that it named itself after a group of colonists that dressed up in Native American war attire and destroyed an entire shipment of cargo?
Please cite where the Tea Party has become violent.
Or the difference between Communism and Absolute Monarchy apparently:
This refers to the "czars", both current and proposed, which are in charge of various bureaucratic regulatory bodies and thus unaccountable to the people. Climate czar, TARP czar, Internet czar, food czar, etc. It's drawing a link between the unaccountability of the appointed czars and the unaccountability of the Soviet government.
I think it's impossible to work together when the people you have to work with are as fanatical as Tea Partiers. Fanaticism doesn't allow for compromise, and no rational person could bow to their demands.
See, this is what worries me: when people are absolutely convinced that the "other side" is completely crazy and can't be reasoned with. That's where things start to get ugly.
This. Sushi's point bears repeating.
I think the Tea Partiers have more than proven their craziness. Showing up at democratic rallies carrying firearms and interrupting the proceedings? It's sending the message they'd rather reason with bullets than with brains. I dunno about you, but I believe that such fear tactics have no place in a democratic society. Their antics put them on my 'aspiring tyrants' list. They should put the guns and threats away if they want to be taken seriously.
So exercising rights is equivalent to fear tactics? If a police officer pulls you over and you choose to remain silent, can he then arrest you for intimidation?
