Questions for the Tea Party

As a general rule, I don't take the Tea Party movement seriously. While I believe that most of the people who attend those rallies are well-intentioned, if powerfully ignorant, I don't see them as independent of anything. The Tea Party is largely the creation of sleazy Republican lobbyists, easily manipulated by Republican office-holders, and entirely dependent on Fox News for their messaging.

All you need do to understand that the Tea Party is GOP AstroTurf is look at the speakers at their rallies. Almost to a person, they are Republican office-holders, candidates and lobbyists. That puts the lie to the idea that they're an "independent" movement. Not only do you not see people independent-minded conservatives like Bob Barr, Pat Buchanan and Joe Scarborough at Tea Parties, they don't even bother with folks like Zell Miller. The Tea Parties are the March of the Pigs, whether the attendees know it or not.

While the rallies have been successful in bringing attention to Obama's almost violent over-spending, and have brought the Democrat's polling numbers down, they seem utterly devoid of any electoral strategy whatsoever.

In fact, they will almost certainly keep the GOP from winning back the Senate by backing actual lunatics, such as Rand Paul in Kentucky. Furthermore, I think those folks are going to be very disappointed in Florida's Marco Rubio after he vanquishes Charlie Crist in the primary and runs to the middle for the general electorate. And throwing their support to the demonstrably unelectable J.D Hayworth in Arizona is never a good idea. Do you think that it's a coincidence that moderate Republicans like Tommy Thompson and George Pataki aren't running for easily winnable Senate seats in deep blue states like Wisconsin and New York? I don't.

If those people still exist in 2012 (which I suspect they won't) and somehow manage to stop Mitt Romney from winning the nomination, they will have created the perfect atmosphere for Obama to be re-elected by a 1964-like margin.

Because she's a magical combination of insane and stupid, I don't often like analyzing anything Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann has to say, but she's finally coming out and saying what reasonable people have known to be true for a year now;

Michele Bachmann is talking merger.

Appearing on CNN’s “Newsroom” on Thursday, the Minnesota Republican dismissed the idea that the Tea Party movement could be a problem for establishment GOP candidates in this year’s elections.

Rather, she said, they’re bonding under the big tent of fiscal conservatism.

"It's really merging into one single, solitary unit," said Bachmann, one of the adopted leaders of the Tea Party movement.

Added Bachmann: “A number of Tea Party groups from around the country are coming together, unifying under the umbrella of economic, fiscal conservatism because Americans, quite simply, feel like they're taxed enough already.”

There's only one problem with that kind of thinking: It's wrong. The GOP hasn't been anywhere near "the umbrella of economic, fiscal conservatism," and haven't been in a decade. They actually set that umbrella on fire when Barack Obama was still in the Illinois state senate.

I'm among the very few people on earth qualified to make this point. I'm on the record screaming about Republican profligacy as far back as 2004, when most of the current Tea Partiers couldn't wait to re-elect as many Republicans as they could find. I pointed out that George Bush promised a trillion dollars more in spending during his convention speech than John Kerry did in his. And that did not win me many friends on the right or the left. As a matter of fact, more than a few people who now describe themselves as Tea Partiers now told me that I was an idiot then.

The truly irresponsible spending by the American government started in 2001, with the lapsing of "PAYGO," the passage of No Child Left Behind and the first of two ginormous tax cuts, the first of their kind during war time - none of which was actually paid for. Indeed, Utah senator Orrin Hatch has gone on the record to say that "it was standard practice not to pay for things" when the Republicans were in power.

In Karl Rove's new book, he defends the 2003 prescription drug benefit - a seven trillion dollar entitlement that no one bothered to pay for - as fiscally conservative because it came in under cost projections. What that means is that because it's only costing $500 billion that nobody has over the the programs first ten years instead of the projected $700 billion, it's a conservative dream project. That's the way these fucking people actually think.

Yes, the Democrats accelerated that spending at a fantastic rate, but what did you expect them to do? They are, after all, Democrats. Liberals enjoy making money disappear. It entertains kids at parties. What's the GOP's excuse?

Yet these are the very same people that the Tea Party wants to put back into power. And I mean that they're exactly the same people.

Of course, I could be wrong. But there's a good way to find out whether I am or not. There are a few questions that Tea Party supporters can and should ask Republican candidates to determine their seriousness about "the umbrella of economic, fiscal conservatism."

• If elected, will you vote for John Boehner as Speaker of the House or Mitch McConnell as Senate Majority Leader?

If the answer to that question is "yes," you know that you aren't dealing with someone who is serious about anything. Boehner and McConnell are pigs of the first order and were on the front lines of blowing all the money during the Bush years. And now that they know that they can get away with spending trillions of dollars, instead of merely hundreds of billions, I fully expect them to continue the recklessness of Pelosi and Reid, if only on different bullshit.

Besides, I don't trust anybody from Ohio who has a tan in fucking February.

Look, I love Representative Paul Ryan as much as the next conservative. In fact, I probably love him more. But I know as a matter of political certainty that he'll vanish within minutes of the GOP taking over Congress again. It'll probably be a bizarre gardening accident or something, but he will be gone. Chances are that Boehner will have Ryan drowned.

• If elected, will you vote to extend the "Pay as You Go" rule to all spending?

"Pay-Go" is a marvellous, but it has to be universally applied at this point. A $12 trillion debt does not leave you with a margin to play around with. And yes, "Pay-Go" should apply to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan at this point. You will never even come close to balancing the budget while running up trillions on the war's credit card.

For the last decade, Republicans have run around screaming about the "existential threat" of Islamic terrorism. An existential threat, as you may know, is something that threatens your very existence, and you don't tend to get more serious than that.

How did the Bush administration and the Republican Congress respond? By asking only one-half of one percent of the American people - the active-duty military, reserves and National Guard - to sacrifice anything at all, while the rest of the country enjoyed their tax cuts and free hard-on pills for grandpa. President Bush actually had the temerity to tell 99.5% of the American people that the greatest sacrifice they could make was to buy themselves something pretty.

Oh, and then they bailed out the airlines, and federalized everything within sight of your local airport, which I don't see them apologizing for.

Can anybody tell me how that's conservative in any way? If America's wars aren't worth asking people to give up their tax cuts and hard-on pills for, they aren't worth asking anyone else to fucking die for. Nearly six thousand kids are dead in two wars that nobody has even suggested doing something as trivial as pay for, for Christ's sake.

• If elected, what specific spending will you vote to cut?

The 1996 Republican platform called for the abolition of the Department of Education. Five years later, the Bush administration and the Republican Congress doubled its funding. The GOP pissed in your eye once and told you it was raining, and I guarantee you that they'll do it again. But only if you let them.

Demand that these cocksuckers give you specific and realistic examples of what they'll cut if elected. And don't, for the love of God, settle for "repeal and replace" on health care. That simply isn't going happen. Not only would it require massive congressional victories in Congress to over-ride a presidential veto (over 130 seats in the House and 26 in the Senate, which has never happened in American history,) I defy you to give me one example of Congress revoking an entitlement once its been passed.

Then there's there small question of how any "replacement" would actually be paid for if the impossible "repeal" ever came to pass. If you fall for "repeal and replace" and eliminating the Department of Education, you deserve bankruptcy.

• If elected, will you seriously consider tax increases to balance the budget?

I know that the "tea" in the Tea Party is supposed to stand for "taxed enough already." The only problem is that you aren't, as evidenced by the existence of your deficits and national debt. If you were taxed enough already, you wouldn't be borrowing upwards of a trillion dollars from the Communist Chinese to sustain capitalism.

When Dwight Eisenhower was president, the top tax rate in the United States was 91%. Not only did Medicare and Medicaid not exist yet, the Social Security pool was much smaller than it is today. Now the top tax rate is about 35%, but entitlements and defense spending have exploded. Since 1961, revenue has steadily gone down as spending has rapidly gone up, that process dramatically accelerating beginning in 1981.

The overwhelming majority of the federal budget consists of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and national defense, all of which no one has the courage to cut in significant ways. If the U.S government stopped all spending and devoted the entire $3 trillion budget to paying off the debt, it would take over four years to do so.

Anyone who tells you that tax cuts will stimulate growth enough to close the budget gap is either lying to you or is functionally retarded. That's just not mathematically possible, particularly with tax cuts that aren't paid for with matching spending cuts.

There are only two ways to bring the budget anywhere near balance and start paying off debt: a draconian combination of spending cuts and tax increases or an inflation rate of about 20%. During the 1970s, the deficit and debt went down dramatically because of inflation. It also almost ruined the American economy, and a deliberate, drastic recession under the Reagan administration - with even higher unemployment than America has now - was necessary to stop it.

Debt itself isn't what kills economies, it's the interest that does it. As a Canadian, I know something about this. By 1984 Parliament was spending 25 cents of every dollar in revenue just to service the existing debt of the socialist paradise Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau brought us.

Even after the implementation of the Free Trade Agreement with the United States and a 7% national Value Added Tax by the Mulroney conservatives, the Chretien Liberals had no other choice but to institute ruthless tax increases and across the board program spending cuts to save the economy. It hurt everybody. And trust me, Canadian Conservatives aren't even as fiscally responsible as the Democrats are. You should see our left at work.

The United States is either at or very near where Canada was then. Cutting spending alone does little to reduce the deficit, since there are increasingly large interest payments on the debt to be paid and the entitlement pool is growing larger every second, as America is spending trillions on overseas military adventures.

If there was a way to avoid titanic spending cuts and painful tax increases, Canada would have figured it out twenty years ago. But there just is no alternative, as Jean Chretien and Paul Martin found out by 1994.

That brings us to the patron saint of the Tea Party movement, Sarah Palin. Palin's situation as governor of Alaska is unique unto itself and in no way represents an example of any kind for the United States as a whole.

Alaska is probably by far the largest welfare case in the Western World today. It takes in far more from the federal government than it pays out. Its economy is also dependent on one resource, oil. Buttressed as she was by federal lucre, Palin implemented a windfall profits tax on Alaska oil companies and gave every man, woman and child in the state $1,300 . I'm pretty sure that I'd have an 85% approval rating if I did that, too. People like free money, which is sort of the problem.

It should be pointed out that gasoline was averaging about four bucks a gallon when Governor Palin was engaging in the Great Alaska Giveaway. The tax refunds that were given to people who barely pay state taxes were subsidized not only by the federal government, but by car owners in places like California, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey. If you drove a car, flew commercially, heated your home, or even took a goddamned bus, you subsidized Sarah Palin's "tax refund" to people who don't pay taxes at all.

You might also notice that she resigned as soon as the world price of oil collapsed, which is an interesting fact that I haven't seen anyone else point out. Why scale back spending or increase taxes when you can just quit?

Palin is either dumb enough or dishonest enough to expect you to believe that her welfare state can be replicated nationally. But the United States as a whole can't do that. Alaska would cease to exist without their government cheese from Washington and ability to extort Big Oil. Sarah Palin governed Alaska the same way Bernie Maddoff ran his hedge fund. If Washington ever gets its shit together, Alaska will be the first place to take it in the balls. It might be the only truly socialist state in the Union.

I'd love to take the Tea Party seriously as an independent political movement, but I can't because they aren't. Whether they know it as individuals or not, they exist solely to perpetuate a Republican party that made Barack Obama possible in the first place. Make no mistake about it, the GOP will swallow the Tea Party whole and shit them out at the first opportunity. The pigs will rule the trough because they always do.

The entire United States government has been nothing less than a massive exercise in accounting fraud since the Kennedy administration. And no one is addressing that. Worse, the fucking Tea Partiers are waving signs bearing George W. Bush's picture that say "Miss Me Yet?" And that accomplishes nothing.

I might be the last guy to give up on the concept of limited government. Pretty much everyone else has already, but they insist on continuing with the empty rhetoric. Asshole Republicans love quoting a line from Reagan's first Inaugural Address, "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."

Unfortunately, they skip the first part of the sentence, which is "In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."

The "present crisis" in 1981 was stagflation, which was a creature of monetary and fiscal policy, derived from the silly idealism of full employment ideology of the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Carter administrations. It was a result of the idea that you could pump money into the system through the Federal Reserve and the tax code and create heaven on earth. That's not true today, although it could be in the very near future.

The problem is rising expenditures, declining revenues, and the deficits and debt that they create. And neither the GOP or the Tea Party do anything to address that. They happen to be the ones who have demagogued Obama on Medicare cuts for the last four months, which will make it easy for the Democrats to demagogue them in the unlikely event that they try to address the problem in the future.

The worst thing about this is that I know that I'll be writing the same post that I'm writing today six years from now because I wrote it six years ago.

I'm really starting to believe that I'm just wasting my time and yours.