bovil | Why the tea parties don't matter

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Why the tea parties don't matter

The "Tea Party" movement is a symbolic failure.

The original tea partiers engaged in criminal acts and risked arrest and imprisonment to destroy product from a company being propped up by unfair reduced taxes by the government, at the expense of what, at the time, amounted to "small business:" the domestic importers of tea who competed with the East India Company.

The current teabaggers are buying tea and throwing it around. That's it. When the DC teabag crew showed up with a truckload of tea bags (yes, I'm serious) to dump in Lafayette Square (because dumping in the Potomac is illegal, can't do that, after all) they were informed that they didn't have the correct permits to dump their load.

So they took it away. They're a bunch of pussies. "Civil disobedience" and "protest" are just words to them. They'll always cave in to authority rather than take a risk for their alleged principles. Samuel Adams would have dumped the tea right then and there.

If they wanted a real symbolic connection with the original Boston Tea Party they would be stealing Chrysler and GM cars and trucks from distribution centers and dumping them in the drink.

But they're not.

Pussies.

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Well, I pulled in at 5PM precisely (which, you might note, is when the permitted protest started, and when the counter-protesters showed up, and when the speechifying started). And all the action was in the park.

So I guess what you saw wasn't "official", any more than the nice folks who went black-bashing last November weren't "official" anti-Prop 8 folks.

Seriously - pick a standard. Just make sure you're willing to live with it.

You walked around through a milling crowd and counted ~2,500 unique people. Wow. That's serious skill there. Or are you being literal, and counted ~2,500 people while walking around the outside?

My solution?
(1) TARP is and was a bad idea. Rather than handing the banks money, either (a) the money used should have been used to take an equity stake in the banks, or (b) the money used should have been used to buy and rehabilitate the "toxic assets" (which, note, I deal with on a daily basis).
(2) That load of crap called the Stimulus bill should never have been passed. If you're going to take on that kind of deficit, use it for capital improvements that enhance the national economy. Among other uses:
- educational grants for either workforce skills or needed degree programs. NOT for "soft" arts, but for, say, engineering (to address the HUGE shortfall in engineering talent coming down the pike) and advanced skills training.
- BUILD stuff. Rebuild roads that serve critical transport needs. Build power generation capacity, and transmission capacity. Subsidize/build/buy national, interstate, and urban broadband... and subsidize rural broadband efforts as well. Build theatres. Build reasonably-priced starter homes. Require everything built to meet LEED Basic standards. Fix water supply and delivery systems. Build inshore/coastal power generation capacity (wind and wave transmit a HELL of a lot of energy). Fund development of next-generation and generation-after-next energy technologies - "clean" coal designs, clean nuclear power, and the more esoteric stuff, like dark energy taps and nanotech-based solutions

Notice, during the Depression FDR put people to work, via the WPA, et al. Now, we're funding extended unemployment draws - longer dole. Spending the same money, but at least the first time, we got something useful out of it.

Lets be realistic: this crash was going to come, regardless of who was in office, and regardless of what Bush did for the last 8 years. Ultimately, it's a demographic hit, as the Boomers check out.

Do I think Obama wants to put the US into even more debt? Honestly, I don't know. As a means of pushing an agenda? Yeah. That being said, purely IMHO, while he may be doing something approaching the right thing at a meta level, his strategic and tactical approaches are, frankly, going to make things worse, not better.

And you seem to be forgetting that Bush 'inherited' a shitty situation too at the end of 2001. Or are you forgetting the 1-2 punch of (a) the dot-bomb, and (b) the post WTC attack hammering of the economy.

No, I used the same methodology PD uses. Take a representational slice of the crowd, count bodies in that area, multiply by how many slices there are.

Which is why I gave a ballpark estimate.

You can also use the area/density method, which is a variation of what I did.

Andy,

Obama a "canny Chicago politician with skills Carter wouldn't develop until long after his presidency?" Um, okay. So, uh, like, what are the super mad crazy skilz Obama has?

Let's see now, choosing nothing but tax cheats and lobbyists for all his cabinet? Groveling up to Putin by promising to can the European part of our BMD? A groveling that was both spurned by Comrade Czar and also pissed off the Czechs and Poles who went out on a limb for that defense? Oh yeah, that's some mad crazy skilz alright.

Oh, and let's not forget Barry showing what a true leader of free men he is by his rushing to mash his nose into the Saudi King's bejeweled sandals. Yeah, that was a proud moment for the Republic alright.

We'll have to see if Obama has any Teflon in him. He does have a well known skill for throwing folks "under the bus" when they become inconvenient for him. His white grandmother and his former pastor - the man who led him to Christ and was "the father he never had."

Yeah, that's some principles and ideals he's holding to.

You think this might explain why so many folk have such low confidence in his economic abilities that they'd take to the streets about it? But then, what's to worry here? Obama's got that Wall Street stooge and tax cheat, Geithner, in charge of the economic show.

Lotsa confidence there alright.

Isn't Geithner the same guy who made sure to negotiate and specify in the Bank Bailout the protections for all those executive bonuses? The bonuses which Obama now piously carries on about them being so wrong?

Teflon coated indeed. Yeah, we'll see how long that lasts.

Madoc

Andy,

Off budget? Like what, exactly?

Madoc

Wait. You don't think FDR's New Deal was evil?

1. I love the equity option for TARP. I just about pissed myself when I heard that somehow that provision was snuck back into the Senate bill that was passed, turned back to the house and signed by the President (after the bank lobby fought tooth and nail to have it removed twice). Nobody noticed it was there until two days later.

On the down-side, it's been used unequally to take equity stakes; some equity stakes (in stronger banks) were bought for near book value, some equity stakes (in weak banks) were bought at well above value. The numbers I've heard vary from $100 in equity for $100 of TARP for strong banks to $60 or less in equity for $100 TARP. Remember also, though, that the mere idea of government buying equity stakes is equal to socialism in many tax protesters' eyes.

The actual "toxic assets" handling? That I've got concerns about. Remember how long Resolution Trust's handling of toxic assets from the S&L meltdown depressed real-estate values. I'd rather not see that happen again; the value of my house has dropped enough already, thankyouverymuch.

2. Those are all great programs (well, except nanotech, K works in nanotech and it's not what a lot of people wish it was). They're also "big government" and "government intrusion" and "hippie environmentalist agendas."

It all still comes down to pork, and what pork is. To a lot of people, pork is spending money somewhere else, on any agenda they don't agree with. Let's say the administration had gone forward with the ideas you like. These protests still would have been inevitable; you just wouldn't have been there.

As to what Bush inherited when he took office?

The dive in the stock market right after Bush's election was just a pothole in the dot-com deflation, a big one, but just the middle of a greater process. No argument there (although it was a sadly amusing punctuation). He inherited the beginnings of a bear market. Ugly? yes. Necessarily resulting in the conversion of a series of budget surpluses to madcap deficit spending? Hardly.

The economic fallout from the WTC attacks isn't Bush's fault, but it did happen entirely on his watch, so it's not something he "inherited."

I think some of the stuff FDR tried to do was evil. Put "packing the Supreme Court" right at the top of the list. It's not a small list, either. But neither was everything he did bad - though some, in retrospect, made things worse, not better. Hindsight is 20/20, and we can learn both from his successes and his failures. Problem is, we're ignoring a bunch of lessons, both from FDR and from other, similar scale messes (JAPAN).

I'm not so sure I prefer the equity option for TARP. Frankly, I've been looking at what the banks refer to as "toxic assets" and drooling. At book rate, wouldn't touch 'em. Discount 'em so they'll market, and there's frankly a LOT of money to be made. I've been offered multi-million $ portfolios of bad debt that I would have _loved_ to buy, at the price offered (70% discount from face). I could have kept, oh, 80-90% of those people in their homes, and _still_ made money hand over fist. Didn't have the $16m required to play. But if I can do it, you're damn skippy the feds could to. They could _make a profit_ on the deal even. Instead, we got the worst of both worlds - no unfrozen credit, but huge raids on the public fisc.

The value of your house, to be quite honest, has depressed enough to get it back into reality. Overall, long-term growth average for Bay Area real estate is right about 7%. And in that I'm talking about a 100 year average. So if you got 3-4 years of 20-40% growth... why don't you think you'll have to cough it up?
[more]

They're called "emergency spending measures" and they're the mechanism that the Bush administration used to fund the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. They appropriate money outside the budget process.

Now we've seen two emergency spending measures since Obama took office; the stimulus bill and the recent emergency spending measure to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (which has strong bipartisan support). We're still operating under Bush's last budget, though. You expect this sort of stuff at the beginning of an administration, particularly one that's trying to change direction quickly and decisively.

You expect this kind of thing at the beginning of a war, too. They tend to not be budgeted for at the outset. It doesn't make sense, though, to not include funding for an ongoing conflict in the budget after this point. Sure, there will likely be emergency spending measures needed to close gaps, but funding all war efforts? The phrase is "spending tricks."

The new Defense budget that Gates & Obama submitted includes funding for war efforts. First time since they started.

Yeah, it's really toxic paper; the real estate is just fine, it's just not worth what the bank has in it.

I actually understand that the market value of my house has dropped from insane to merely absurd. I moved to CA from the midwest, where my place would be valued at maybe $60k, even in a big city. Prop 13 and population pressure has had very odd results on the economy of the housing market.

Still, flooding the market with discounted "toxic assets" would depress it even further.

Part 2.
I know about nanotech. My brother's doing a project up at Stanford nanofab. He's also holder of the first (ever) Casimir-effect patent granted in the US. I help him brainstorm some of his design issues, and I'm supposed to edit the paper he's working on, if we can pry the underlying data loose from the guy he's co-writing with.

As to pork... no, it doesn't all come down to pork. It comes down to economics.

Here's the thing. All the money borrowed eventually, theoretically, has to be paid back - and interest has to be paid while it's out. So, if you're going to borrow the money, you need to use it in places that will generate positive returns. Preferably, you need to use it on things that generate positive returns that are one-time charges (aka capital expenditures). You need to NOT use it on things that don't generate positive returns. And you REALLY need to not use it on programs that don't generate positive returns, but that also have continuing, multi-year (or endless) draws. Because the deficit spending is a one-time infusion of funds. As such, it needs to be spent in a one-time manner. Educational grants? Building stuff? That's all one-time. Infrastructure is really good, because it's (a) a one-time expense, and (b) something that improves productivity, increasing overall systemic returns.

Think of it this way: if someone hands you a one-time payment of $5000, are you going to use it to pay for a thing, or are you going to use it to pay for a $200/month service? In either case, what do you do in year 3?

As to 2001-02...We had, at the same time:
- a recession
- a war
- and an unnatural disaster.
Take a look at a chart of the Dow from 2000-2002. We had a big drop in late 2000 another in early 2001, the post-9/11 slam, then another in mid-2002, leading into a triple bottom, with the third round of that in early 2003.
http://thepatternsite.com/dj2000.html

The dot-bust, and the end of _that_ bull market? Yeah, that's entirely inherited... and it would have necessarily meant the end of budget surpluses, without significant cutbacks across the board (and yes, that includes social programs).

Not really. You might note that real estate sales right now are booming... because prices have come down to something reasonable.

And yes, Bay Area real estate takes a little getting used to. One thing I have to point out to many people is that where, in most cities, you would have an urban core, we have water. Most cities have, essentially, a bell curve for valuations. Ours is a wierd annulus, due to our oddly-constrained geography.

Here's the thing. All the money borrowed eventually, theoretically, has to be paid back - and interest has to be paid while it's out. So, if you're going to borrow the money, you need to use it in places that will generate positive returns. Preferably, you need to use it on things that generate positive returns that are one-time charges (aka capital expenditures). You need to NOT use it on things that don't generate positive returns. And you REALLY need to not use it on programs that don't generate positive returns, but that also have continuing, multi-year (or endless) draws. Because the deficit spending is a one-time infusion of funds. As such, it needs to be spent in a one-time manner. Educational grants? Building stuff? That's all one-time. Infrastructure is really good, because it's (a) a one-time expense, and (b) something that improves productivity, increasing overall systemic returns.

I'm not saying that's not sound economics. It's grade-a textbook theory with a boatload of evidence to bolster it.

But that doesn't matter.

Do you honestly believe if you took the microphone at a tea party protest and proposed a strong and detailed plan that involved a great deal of deficit spending that the crowd would believe in it? Do you honestly believe that it would be received as anything other than a big-government tax-and-spend initiative?

I don't see that. I see in response a barrage of boos and rotten tomatoes.

Andy,

Ah, okay, I get it! The lack of consistency is something you damn in others but hold up for praise in yourself. Hmm.... You know, I think there is a consistency there. Somewhere. :)

Also, that's a nice touch with the Astroturfing reference there - considering just how many miles of Astroturf Obama has laid down. This, even _after_ he got into office.

But then, what else should we expect from a guy who took his lessons from Soros. That man is a pro at Astroturfing and he's been spending more money at it than Armey has even dreamed of.

You also gotta admit Andy that there are precious few Democrats who would've caught the "teabagging" reference either. It is a rather... esoteric... thing.

Madoc

Andy,

"Emergency spending measures?" That's it? That's the "corruption" you claimed? That's the "hidden" spending? That's what Obama is now being "honest" about? Wow, that's some great innuendos there Andy and all about teacup temptests.

The "off budget" items were as out in plain sight and accountable as you can get. They also enjoyed continuous Democratic support throughout the Dubya's years. And such "spending tricks" are hardly proof of corruption. Good thing to, as the Democrats in Congress used such "off budget" maneuvers to keep from having to include Social Security in their budget and thus were able to gain polically from having "balanced" the budget.

Come on Andy, this was a pretty sly thing to try and weedle through here. Particularly with the inference that it was something the Dubya / GOP dreamt up on their own and somehow was proof of "corruption."

Madoc

I expect people to follow their own rules, that's where I expect consistency. It's part of the reason I despise religionists who pick and choose their rules based on what's convenient and what supports their desired position.

So, yeah, I'm disappointed that Obama hasn't carried through on some of his campaign promises, but there's still time for many of those to be met. I'm not disappointed that he's made some pragmatic choices and changed some of his positions, because the Democrats haven't enshrined consistency as a leading principle. Obama changed positions during the election cycle. It's not a surprise that he's doing it now. I'm not going to like all of them, but I may like some of them better than the original positions.

Republican talking points, whether campaign or during a term, do enshrine consistency. Whether it's Bush's "flip-flopper" charges against Kerry, "weather-vane" charges against Clinton's love of polls or Caribou Barbie's "I never supported the Gravina Island Bridge" lie, consistency (or at least apparent consistency) has been a cornerstone.

Deficit hawks are deficit hawks, not just sometimes-deficit-hawks. Small government advocates actually advocate for and vote for small government, not for huge spending and program increases. Pork-busters don't cart the pork home to their own district.

Only we both know that's not how it works.

Representatives that don't bring projects (dollars) back to their tax-paying constituents in their districts don't last long.

Democrats just don't feel as guilty about doing it. And that, there, is consistency.

It was a calculated effort to make the budgets submitted by the Bush administration look smaller, and to delay the full accounting.

You should have been there, then. There were a LOT of small business owners. They get this kind of thing. There probably would have been a lot of disagreement about details, but... they grok the concept of capital investment. The disagreement would be over targets and amounts.

Regardless, that isn't what we're facing.

Andy,

Well, that sounds like some highly rationalized waffling to me.

I have no problem with someone changing their views when faced with fact. I have no problem with a politician stating one thing and then, when the situation has changed, changing their policies in accordance with the new reality.

I do have a problem - a substantial problem - with politicians who state one thing in order to "play to their base" and gain political power only to turn right 'round and do 180 degrees the opposite.

That isn't Obama simply being "pragmatic" it is instead Obama lying through his teeth. A couple of times is one thing. Particularly for a guy with _zero_ executive experience and a political horizon no bigger than Cook County. But as frequently, as deeply, as widely, and as shamelessly as Obama has been doing it? No, that's not some naif becoming learned in the ways of the world. It's an oily lying hypocritical politician "doing it the Chicago way" writ large.

And it worries me deeply that this same glibly lying sleaze is putting those same "principles" to work with his economic policies.

Madoc

That's doesn't answer my question, though. One-to-one discussion is different than speaking to a crowd, and disagreement over details can scuttle a greater agreement.

How would the crowd have reacted if you presented the ideas you just described here on the microphone?

Actually, it _does_ answer your question. It's just not the answer you want to hear, so you're dismissing it.

No, it really doesn't.

An answer would be "Yes, I believe I could picked up the microphone about serious government spending on infrastructure and been received positively by the crowd" or "Yes, there were people at the podium speaking about serious government spending on infrastructure" or "No, are you crazy? I would have been lynched."

I don't get a lot of mainstream news media. I tend to cross-check coverage of things I'm interested in between CNN, Fox News, foreign press coverage (for national events) and local reporting (giving actual local reporting a little more weight).

My opinion of the tea parties and the tea party movement has been heavily influenced by Fox. They are the tea party network. They billed the whole shebang as FNC Tea Parties. They're where the blanket coverage is.

As I said, I favor print media over TV, but I caught about an hour of Fox post tea-party commentary yesterday. What was their focus?

Well, there was a lot on mortgaging our children's future, complete with the speaker's baby sitting in her lap to illustrate the point and show how much they care about the childrens. Yeah, I'm cynical on that one.

There was a lot of focus on CNN's alleged staged interview (yes, I've seen the "Founding Bloggers" footage too). I'm guessing this is to distract from Neil Cavuto being caught on open mic tripling the attendance figure he was given for the Sac tea party.

There was a lot of focus on Nancy Pelosi.

Not much love for government capital investment in infrastructure to be seen anywhere. If you believe this coverage is distorting the reality, go ahead and say so. I won't be crushed if someone accuses Fox of distorting rather than reporting.

I still think it actually does boil down to what the gal who was chastising Susan Roesgen in the "Founding Bloggers" footage about.

It's not about good economics. It's about the government taking money and spending in on things the protesters don't agree with.

That's where it breaks down.

You've got an economic model for government spending that you believe in (and I think has some definite merit). I believe you see the value of government capital investment as long as it can be demonstrated the infrastructure will actually be used, even if the return isn't direct and personal.

But that's your dividing line between spending you agree with and spending you don't agree with. Not everybody shares that line. This is a mix-up of people who have differing economic models for better government spending, people who love government spending as long as it's on their priorities, people who love government spending as long as it's not Obama and the Democrats directing it and people for whom all government spending is anathema.

The details aren't going to be so easy to hash out. It's difficult to convert a negative protest movement into a positive movement for something.

Andy,

Okay, so in a very short bit of posting you've gone from slyly alleging that Bush's "off budget" stuff was a thing of "corruption" to being "spending tricks" and now it's just a "delay in the full accounting." Nice attempt at a smear job there Andy.

What the Bush administration has done with the supplemental funding requests has been anything but an attempt to "hide" those moneys. Those requests have come in and gone through their full and just "due diligence" in the appropriations process. They've also been ultimately accounted for. There's nothing "hidden" or "spending trick" about them.

If anything, by funding the Iraq fighitng in such a separate process that has given Congress more visibility into it and thus has a better grasp as to the detail of the expenses.

That Obama is now rolling it all together may make it appear a more nice 'n tidy thing but does not enhance its transparency on the whole. Yet another promise by Obama (his pledge of increased "transparency" in his administration) that he's happily reneging on.

Madoc

Well, here's where your whole train of logic breaks down.

You're assuming that because Fox _said_ they're FNC Tea Parties, that they're Fox news-based.

Guess what. They aren't. I can honestly say I've watched a total of 10 minutes of Fox news coverage in the last 6 months. If that, and then only because that's what the TV in the waiting room happened to be tuned to.

Rick Santelli may have provided a high-profile, made-for-media moment, but the Tea Parties are, really, not a Santelli creation (he was reacting to the first Tea Party, and suggesting they bring it to Chicago), and certainly not an Fox-created thing.

This is grass roots. Just as much as, if not more than, Moveon, DKos, or any of the other left groups when they got going (which, note, have evolved into online astroturf groups - I'm really hoping this doesn't head the same direction).

To give you the kind of answer you think you want, I wouldn't have been lynched, a lot of people would have wanted to think about it, and such a proposal would have been seriously received. That being said, fundamentally at that place, at that time, it's a distraction. Like I said previously _and you ignored_, that's not the set of bills that were passed, that's not the stimulus that got railroaded through, and that's not the debate we're having. So your continued insistence on it is a deliberate distraction. It's a smokescreen, so you can ignore the issue.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if Fox decided to slant reporting to favor their corporate political agenda. They have one, so does every other network and print media source. I find it interesting that a group put, what, 1.5m people on the streets around the country, in a coordinated manner, in over 700 cities... and the best the Merc could do for coverage was a little blip on the bottom of the business section. Oh, and speaking of distorting the figures... Yep, Cavuto got caught. Guess what. The Merc did the same thing, in the other direction. And got caught, by multiple observers. Only thing missing is the open-mic smoking gun.

And frankly, you mistake my preferences, though I can see why. What I said originally was that IF we're going to do something like this, it should be done differently. The case studies say so, the historic models say so, and any idiot with a calculator says so. IF we're going to have Stimulus bill, it needs to be done differently. We've mortgaged our future on this thing, and spent the proceeds foolishly. We've used the next two generations as an ATM to prop up social programs we can't afford, and buy into new ones we definitely can't afford.

But that doesn't mean I necessarily agree with the necessity of the Stimulus bill in the first place. The underlying issue was always getting the credit markets unfrozen (which, note, they still are, to a significant extent). Anything that distracts from that is wasted effort. Anything not aimed at that is, frankly, not relevant. We've already demonstrated that TARP was the wrong approach (and continues to be so). The Stimulus bill? No better.

My preference, that being said, is for smaller government. Frankly, (a) I have problems with the growth of the last 30+ years, and (b) I don't see that the Stimulus bill was a good idea _in the first place_. I'm one of those "balanced budget, less government is good government" people.

It's difficult to convert a negative protest movement into a positive movement for something.
Yep. As the anti-prop-8 folks so clearly demonstrated.

Andy,

"Democrats just don't feel as guilty about doing it."

The more I think about that the more I see the problems with it.

Politics brings together power and money. Whenever that happens corruption soon follows. That's an inevitable fact of life the supersedes party and ideology. The only way to fight corruption in politics and government is to choose politicians of the highest ethical character and then hold them to it as much as possible.

This, while recognizing that it is a losing battle over time.

The fact that the Democratic politicians are less likely to feel guilty about corruption is not a thing to celebrate.

That so many Democratic politicians are so guilt free as to their lack of ethics and lack of political consistency explains much of the ethical morass that is the Democratic party. This, particularly so in Illinois where the corruption is about the most deeply rooted of all the Democratic state operations.

Considering that Obama got his political start in such a political sewer that to is nothing to celebrate. I wonder just how "guilt free" he is. Considering his actions thus far, he seems right up there with his states recently deposed governor. We might ask the good Mr. Rezko about that...

Madoc

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Why the tea parties don't matter

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Obama = Carter

Off Budget?

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Consistency Fetish

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Guilt-Free Democrats