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Originally Posted by Cimarron29414
I would say the early iteration was primarily FOR government fiscal responsibility. In simplest terms, don't spend a dollar which you do not have. It's pretty obvious why this would appear to be anti-Obama, since he spent trillions of dollars he didn't have. So, yeah - a negative spin on the movement would look very much like the party of No.
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This is key, I think. It's also why I don't agree with the Tea Party position. I'm also for fiscal responsibility; however, the Tea Party is specifically against deficit spending, or, perhaps, Keynesian economics in particular.
The idea of being so rigidly against deficit spending seems disastrous to me. Ideally, a government is at the mercy of economic variables over which they have some or no control. The thing to keep in mind is that sometimes you have to borrow money when running operations. Even the best-managed companies do this. To suggest that you never go over budget or that you should never borrow money or that you should spend money in bad times to alleviate some root problems to me is folly.
In Canada, attempts have been made to make balancing budgets mandatory, but come 2008, that seemed a silly thing to do. Basically, if you balance your budget in a down economy, you are going to have to severely cut existing programs, which can have a negative spiraling effect.
In the U.S., this would likely come mainly in the form of either a) hitting the poor, or b) hitting the military budget.
It would make most sense to slash the military budget, and severely. The U.S. is grossly overspending in that area; it's ridiculous. Why isn't the Tea Party going after that? There's a lot of money being sunk into that.