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but pan, it seems to me that you assume for some reason that the overall situation we're in is more or less normal.
it really isn't.
i'm a bit surprised that folk who object to expenditure levels on principle focus on social programs and not on the most costly and useless areas of state spending: procurement of cold-war style military technologies---and by extension the whole of the national security state.
on the other hand, it has been the case empirically since the reagan period that conservatives have used massive military spending to do their version of the same kind of thing obama is doing---prop up an economic sector through state spending because it not only buys political power, but also because it was functional insofar as neoconservative political goals were concerned.
so the fact that this area of waste--and it is waste---never seems to come up as a Problem is an indication that this is not really a problem about taxes, but rather a problem about conservative politics that is using taxation as a cheap and easy way to advance a version of the same agenda that landed us in this mess in the first place.
on the other hand, it's hard not to see in the tarp program a singularly ill-concieved attempt to prop up the financial system---but it is a conservative program. it is incoherent in significant measure because it was developed exceedingly quickly by people who are ideologically opposed to the idea of such programs and so seemingly had no idea how to do them. that it's developed into another wave of looting is not a surprise--conservative economic policy has enabled looting of most social sectors by politically favored sectors for a long time.
so there are problems with this tea party business that do not go away no matter how many times "power to the people" gets tacked onto them.
and we've had 30 odd years of conservative "power to the people"---it hasn't worked out so well has it? what make you think that this go-round is any different?
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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