I despise the Tea Party-they represent to me a danger to the United States that is equal to any other the country has faced. A few million docile swine-being manipulated by some very unscrupluous men. They may not being wearing brown shirts physically-but they are of the same caliber of people who manned the ranks of the Brown Shirts way back when. I will continue to attack them at every opportunity-because they deserve the scorn and derison of those of us who actually have the clarity of vision to see through them.
Maybe what it is going to take is for the GOP to take the House and the Senate so that the Tea Party candidates can be exposed as being every bit an empty suit they say Obama is. But before we plunge off that cliff, we might want to play the tape all the way to end to see where it leads.
For the Tea Party to achieve a real measure of power – which I profoundly hope will not be the case – they would rapidly run up against reality: to retain any popular support, they have to deliver economic salvation, and deliver it fast, to the working and middle classes. All the anti-government rhetoric in the world, in the current economic crisis, does not change the fact that there’s simply no way to do that by wielding anti-government, anti-regulation axes. And since the President is not going away for at least two years and has a veto pen-that is not going to happen soon. The American public only has an attention span of about one year-and that is why the current administration is in trouble now. These are not normal times.
Even in a best-case scenario, it will take years to generate enough jobs to replace the 8 million lost since the start of the recession. Quite simply, the private markets alone do not have the ability to return the country to prosperity. And the odds are not good that the Tea Party goons can do that on their own. For one thing, a point I keep wishing to drive home to you, global economic trends and demographics are not on the Tea Partiers side. For the last 20 years or so, Americans have been outsourcing most of their industrial capacity to the developing world. Previous recoveries have happened by stimulating consumer demand, which in turn stimulates the industrial sector. But there really isn’t an industrial sector anymore, and consumers, seemingly having learned a lesson from the financial panic, are saving and paying down personal debt. Even if people weren’t saving, increased consumer demand would only widen the trade deficit with China and move even more money and jobs overseas. And those “brown people” they don’t like are out birthing them two to one.
Despite all their talk-Tea Partiers are not serious about slashing the federal deficit. All the cosmetic spending cuts you folks think you can make-it does not change the fact that the big ticket items – Social Security, Medicare, defense spending, homeland defense – they want to make exempt from spending reductions. That contrasts with cuts of 20, 30, in some cases even 50% in revenues taken in by, and consequently in spending carried out by, city, county, and state level governments. Until you restructure the Big 4 items above-you can’t make any real dent in the budget. And the day you take that on-stand by for a huge fight from more than just the usual folks you make into villains. What is really funny is that these guys want to exacerbate the situation by allowing the Bush tax cuts to continue which will punch an even bigger hole in the deficit. Tax cuts won’t generate additional federal revenue-not this time. (They never did before either).
The Tea Party can bemoan this all they want, and douche Teabaggers can continue to whine about the federal government; but, at the end of the day, if they become “incumbents” they will have to work out how to govern rather than simply rage against masturbation. ( How anyone can be opposed to that is beyond my ken). They will, in other words, have to change from being spoiled children to being adults in a complex world. And, unless they want to become as loathed as the current batch of incumbents they are attacking, they will have to work out how to use the tools at the federal government’s disposal to help get the unemployed back to work in an economic environment in which private markets alone aren’t up to the challenge.
And if Saint Sarah actually wins the Presidency? Well the government will get even bigger than it is now. You can take that to the bank.
Be careful what you wish for.