Reflections on Tea Parties

I’ve heard so much nonsense written about these tea parties. Let’s leave MSNBC’s homo-erotica totally out of the picture and just talk about reasonably reputable sources.

CNN says they are “anti-CNN”. Wow! Narcissist much? These are the kind of guys that Tweet, “I’m eating a really good sandwich right now” without realizing that even their friends don’t care.
This is the ranting of a network that has no idea how irrelevant they are in their own marketplace. <cough cough> ratings <cough>

Fox News says they are “anti-Tax” (same page, scroll down a little). Well, at least they aren’t saying they are “pro Fox”. They are a little anti-Tax, but not in the sense that we don’t think we should pay taxes.
In fact, I think 9 out of 10 party goers would agree that MORE people need to be paying taxes. A fundamental problem with our system now is that only about half the people pay anything at all and the top 2-3% of income earners pay the lion’s share. Everyone should be a stake holder in America. No one group should get a tax cut or tax increase. That is the epitome of fairness and avoids the built-in danger of all democracies.
Somehow Fox News has seized for itself some sort of credit in this movement. I’m not sure how that happened. We all know that this idea is straight from Rick Santelli on CNBC.

Republican party leaders seem to think this is an event supporting them. Hold on there guys. Please reference the Congressional Record from 2001-2006 and tell me why we’d be looking to you for leadership. I heard of some tea party events where Republican politicians were booed off the stage.

People everywhere are saying they are “anti-Obama”. I’ll concede there is a heavy thread of this but ONLY because he’s the current driver of this policy. Virtually all of the people at these tea parties were just as upset at the Bush-Paulson plan, which Obama has extended and continued. Virtually all of the people at these tea parties were just as upset at the Bush stimulus plan of 2008, and it was a mere shadow of the current one.
And Obama’s not alone. Pelosi and Reid are right up there on the anger list.

The key to “getting it” on these tea parties is to realize that what people are upset about are fundamental changes to the fabric of our culture and society that will have a starkly negative outcome. This isn’t a guess. You can look at many examples, the UK comes to mind. As Margaret Thatcher said, “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”

So the tea parties are not about throwing Obama out. They're not about cutting taxes per se. They are about stopping our trip down this change in our economic system. Consider:

• For the first time ever, the Federal government has replaced a CEO, effectively by order. (GM)
• For the first time ever, the Federal government has forced healthy banks to accept money they didn’t want. (Wells Fargo, and others)
• AND they won’t let them pay it back despite their desire to do so.
• Because the VA hospitals work so well, they want to take over the entire medical system.

There are two choices facing us: “trickle down prosperity” (AKA the way economies actually work, like it or not) or “trickle up poverty”.
We newly dubbed right wing extremist tea party goers prefer the former.

You can point fingers all you want, but the entire mess we are in right now has its roots in government intervention in the housing market that forced institutions to loan money to people who shouldn’t have gotten loans. In response to that level of risk, these same institutions created all kinds of securitization to protect themselves from that injection of business risk.
Further, the government institutions Fannie and Freddie have been piggy banks for politicians (primarily Democrat ones) and pretended to be both private and public institutions depending on what suited them in a particular instance.

Capitalism and free markets didn’t fail. The thumb of government was on the scale the whole time and markets were trying to react and protect themselves as best they could until it all came down.

There are solutions for all this. “Bankruptcy” (sorting good assets from bad ones and getting the value from the good), “foreclosure” (removing you from property you don’t own and aren’t keeping your word in paying for), and “renting” (the place you live when you can’t afford a house). Just let it happen and it will all get better a lot more quickly.