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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.
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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My point is that Bush ran up that huge deficit when the economy was stable. Do you think Obama WANTS to put the US into even more debt? People seem to think he's sitting around going "ooh what ways of ruining the country can I think of today?". He inherited a shitty situation and in all likelihood ANYBODY would have had to do a lot of the same things.
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One thing Obama could do is stop trying to spend our way out of the recession.
You'd think that for a guy as bright as Barrack Obama likes to portray himself as being he'd know this. Spending yourself out of an economic downturn is but failure writ large.
The US tried it back in the Great Depression and FDR's policies had all about crapped out by the late 30's. Things were looking pretty bleak for the US economy about then and it was only the advent of WWII that stopped us from entering another multi-year recession / depression.
The Japanese tried spending themselves out of their economic downturn in the early 90's. Even to this day they're still trying to dig themselves out of the ensuing mess and economic disaster.
According to the non-partisan OMB last Fall, the US economy was largely on track to recover in late '09 and early 10. This was before Obama, Pelosi and Reid decided to break the bank and lay their hands on it all. Now? Numbers released today show the recession as _deepening_ and getting _worse_ over the next _several_ years.
That, folks, is change we can believe in!
Yes, we can!
Thank you Barry Obama!
And that's the central motivation for the Tea Party protests.
Madoc
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WWII for the US was spending to win the war. The economic effects of that were nice but entirely secondary to the necessity of winning that war.
The things which made a difference for the US and made for lasting economic growth from that period were the hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of _foreign_ governments spending in the US. This, back when a billion dollars was worth something.
That was money _added_ to our economy and not simply dropped into the loop by the Treasury Department.
Further, the US economy could only _but_ grow after the war if for no other reason than the economies of all our former competitors were utterly shattered by that war. And I'm talking about England, primarily, here and not the economies of the countries we physically shattered.
If government spending to win a war as a bona fide means of making a nation's economy better than it wouldn't have taken Britain and the rest of the world a quarter century to catch back, economy-wise, up to the US after WWII. And that massive government spending on defense wouldn't have seen the collapse of the Soviet Union either.
With the current fiscal "policy" coming from the White House and Congress we're not even getting anything as priceless as national security. Instead, it's a multi-TRILLION dollar exercise in partisan spending, pork spending, and government growth.
And that's just in the past three months. Looking ahead, Obama is promising even _larger_ deficits.
That's something worth protesting alright.
Madoc
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Noope, pork spending is pork spending. Period.
If you were against the Bush administration's pork spending, if you were against the Bush administration's fiscal restraint failures, then you should be outraged at the Obama administrations pork spending extravaganza.
Hell Andy, if you were consistent about such things, you'd have been down there amidst the Tea Party folk shouting your support for their cause.
Instead, you've gone out of your way to attack and dismiss the civic protests.
What ever happened to that "dissent is patriotic" bit?
Or is that only true when the dissent is coming from the left?
Madoc
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Actually, quite a few Republicans took Bush and his administration to task for their civil liberties antics. Quite a few others looked at the actual effect of those policies and measured them against the threat we then faced and found those policies acceptible - with proper checks and balances.
You'll note how it's Republican appointed judges who were formerly taking the Dubya to task for his violations are now taking Obama to task for the same antics.
As to the spending, there were no few "traditional" conservatives who were outraged at the "blank cheque" approach the GOP had come to take during the Bush years. They quite accurately forecast the defeat at the polls such negligence would entail.
It's been interesting to listen to some folks criticizing the Tea Party protests who have gone on record as stating them to be "racist." The hypocrisy runs deep indeed.
Madoc
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But if you want to believe that a few moderate and non-corrupt Republicans balance out the sheer insanity of the past 8 years, while anybody who wants to wait a bit longer and put a little trust in the very new President - instead of fearmongering and spreading misinformation (like the all-catastrophe-all-the-time Fox News) - is a hypocritical loon, there's obviously nothing I can say to change that.
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No, I'm not buying into the "tyranny or oppresion" stuff. I've not heard such claims being made from rational folk on the right. Claims coming from the irrational folk - be they on the right or the left - are generally pretty easy to both spot and to discount immediately.
I'm gauging Obama by his actions and the scale for that gauge is where his predecessors were at roughly the same time they'd been in office. By that guage and scale, Obama is charging hell for leather off the edge and he's driving the nation there ahead of him.
Obama is this century's first Carter and if you'll remember what Carter led to you to would share the outrage about him now.
Madoc
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Obama = Carter
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You miss the point, though. I'm talking about definitions. Pork is very malleable. "Pork" is only pork when it's being spent somewhere else.
Take a look at Senator Inhofe, screaming about how the entire defense budget is being gutted and how America is being put at risk when, in fact, the overall defense budget is being increased. Look a little further, and you'll see one of the cuts in the new defense budget is an expensive "weapons of the future" program that's being developed in his state. Some people might call that spending pork. I might look at the budget and project realignment that Secy. Gates is proposing and think as a whole it's actually increasing Defense's readiness.
Say we've got a sewer project that we haven't got the money to fix locally, and our rep is looking for a few million out of the federal budget to make up the difference. Is that pork? The folks who have screwed up sewers and who are paying local, state and federal taxes probably don't think so. The folks in Oklahoma who want that big weapons program might have a different opinion.
I feel comfortable being conflicted about the bail-outs. Really, I do. Part of me would love to see GM and Chrysler and AIG go under, and see their management suffer for their screw-ups. Part of me looks back at the Chrysler and S&L bail-outs which were expensive but produced a net profit for the government in the end, and thinks it's not all that bad. Part of me looks at what would happen if Chrysler and GM do fail, and thinks not just of all the skilled union jobs in the Midwest that will be lost, but also all the skilled at-will jobs that would be lost around the country when the dealership networks fall down with it (in interest of full disclosure, none of my mechanic or car-sales friends work for Chrysler or GM dealerships).
I also feel comfortable criticizing the tea party movement. There may be some real grassroots upwelling there, but it's been heavily astroturfed by Dick Armey's lobbying/consulting business and Fox News and exploited by GOP speakers (who, I hear, were booed at some events by the tea partiers for their hijack attempts) to get a boost for the party. I hear a lot about how this was the conservative movement's (or the Republican's, depending on reportage) great embracing of the internet to catch up to the Obama campaign's online prowess, but I don't see that in the results. They aimed high, going for a strong symbol of American history, but they didn't figure out how to translate it effectively to their issue. Hell, they embraced "teabagging" and then wondered why people laughed.
Consistency Fetish
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
Re: Consistency Fetish
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.
Re: Consistency Fetish
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
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(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.
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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."
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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Regardless, that isn't what we're facing.
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How would the crowd have reacted if you presented the ideas you just described here on the microphone?
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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.
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Landslides? Say what?
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