Monday, September 13, 2010

Tea Parties Should Have Tea and Scones, Not Right-Wing Politics


Although I'm in a reasonably good humor this afternoon, it has been several days since I put up my last post, and it is Monday, and Mondays are associated with the color blue, and they're supposed to be a time for crankiness. Therefore, I have elected to spend some time bitching about the Tea Party and maybe if I have room, bitch a little bit more about the core of Republicanism, "Trickle Down Economics." It is past Labor Day and November elections are just around the corner. Electioneering and silliness are cranking up to their silliest.

Apparently, the core of the Republican Party is in the throes of trying their damnedest to stop Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and the Tea Party set in general from taking over the party. So what's the difference between the two? Well I do believe we're talking about the difference between right-wing and righter-wing, between conservative and radically stupid about downsizing government.

The Republican Party has always been, in my lifetime, the party of less government, and the party of big business. More recently they have taken on an infusion of social conservatism as well, i.e. anti-abortion, pro-religion, and anti-gay. Now the Tea Party set have added a whole new dimension to this. Their stances are somewhere just this side of anarchy. They believe whole-heartedly in declaring this to be a Christian nation and one that speaks English, by gosh. Needless to say, this doesn't sit well with the big business, Country Club Republicans who like to keep a low profile and keep the buckolas rolling in by gutting the government's ability to regulate business and tax it. Let's just all have another martini and chill out a little, shall we?

I did a little bit of research and found out a few of the things that the Tea Party stands for and a couple of things they seem to be against:
1) They are against all pork barrel spending, and by their definition, just about anything could qualify as pork barrel waste.
2) They oppose the 2008 Wall Street bailout, despite the fact that the entire world economy would, in all likelihood, have experienced a serious meltdown and precipitated a serious depression, not recesion, had the government not acted to bail them out. I might add that their opposition is despite the fact that none other than G.W. Bush championed these bailouts.
3) They are opposed to any sort of climate change legislation. A lot of Tea Partiers seem to be in denial about global warming and the need to act to stop global disasters.
4) Tea Partiers, on the other hand, are for keeping God in the Pledge of Allegiance, despite any possibility that this might run contrary to the Constitutionally guaranteed separation of church and state.
5) Tea Partiers are for massive spending cuts, not tax increases to balance the budget. Apparently, no one in the Tea Party has a father or mother who need Medicare or Social Security. Apparently no one in the Tea Party needs government assistance in seeing that they or someone they know and love can receive healthcare. Apparently no one in the Tea Party sees the need to spend money on educating our population so they can become productive citizens and can function in a 21st century job market. Apparently no one in the Tea Party cares about funding the military to protect us or cares about building roads or overseeing airports or upgrading the train system so our nation can claim to be one of the advanced nations of the world. Perhaps they would rather we continue down the road to becoming another backwater with a wealthy elite and huge uneducated poverty stricken underclass.
6) Tea Partiers believe in personal responsibility, not handouts and in unfettered capitalism, not government oversight. All I can say to this is Oh my God. Have these people not been paying attention? Have they no idea that poverty breeds poverty and wealth breeds more wealth? Have they no idea that ethnicity, social class, and educational level of parents are big time determinants of how children grow up and function? Have they paid no attention whatsoever to the history of the past one hundred years? Unfettered capitalism got us into this mess. Government oversight is necessary to protect the rights of the many from the excesses of the few.

This brings us to the intersection of mainstream Republicanism and that of the Tea Party. They both are pushing the idea that getting government out of the business of regulating business will benefit the entire populous. They are both promoting the idea that less taxation of the wealthy means those wealthy invest that money and create more jobs for the not so wealthy. There is a word for this. It is bullshit. This is the same tired idea of "trickle down economics" that has been promoted by the Republican Party since the 1920's. It was recycled by Ronald Reagan as "Supply-Side Economics" and was better known by the general public as "Reaganomics." No less a Republican than George Herbert Walker Bush (Bush, the elder) called it "Voodoo Economics."

You cannot cut taxes and create more tax revenue. You cannot cut taxes and fund endless oversea military adventures. You cannot keep the big business community from screwing the American people by gutting the government's ability to oversee and regulate business. You cannot rid the country of dire poverty by asking everyone to just pick themselves up by their bootstraps and accept responsibility for themselves. Doesn't work now. Didn't ever work.

Part of the hue and cry of the Tea Party is to take the government back, to get back to what made this country great, to get back to the principles that are embedded in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. As a teacher and student of history and government, all I can say is that these are a lot of people who weren't paying much attention when they were in history and government classes. I'm not sure that any of them have spent much time in a Constitutional Law class. If they had, they'd have a much better grip on reality.

A great deal of our governmental foundations are based on the Enlightenment Principles set forth by John Locke and Baron de Montesquieu, among others. Governments exist by the will of the people. It is government's job to protect the innate rights of their citizens, i.e. "Life, liberty, and property." Separation of powers protects the citizenry from having one group gaining too much power and screwing the others. All of that being said, what is allowed by the Constitution is open to interpretation of what protecting the rights of the citizens means. Many things are permitted, and a graduated income tax is a much more just system of paying for what is necessary than are sales taxes and such that are regressive, costing poor people larger percentages of their wages than wealthy people.

Protecting the rights of the citizens sometimes means protecting some groups within society from other groups. That can mean government oversight of business. Sometimes that can mean giving a little monetary assistance and healthcare to the elderly when they can no longer contribute to society. Sometimes it means giving a little assistance and counseling to those who cannot take care of their families. Sometimes it just means paying a little from your own pocket to assist those less able to fend for themselves. It means having compassion.

To gut government and make it continually smaller, is to set large sectors of society adrift to fend for themselves against a tide of forces much more powerful than they are. It brings to mind yet another Enlightenment political philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, who said that "in a state of nature mankind's life is nasty, brutish, and short." Personally, I'll take a compassionate government over the dog eat dog state of nature, law of the jungle life.


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