Republican candidates are "pledging allegiance to the Tea Party"

no, cutting unemployment now would not be beneficial to the middle class. cutting these entitlements programs could possibly stop us from going bankrupt or seeing hyper inflation though. we currently have 14.5 trillion in debt, but what's worse is we have $115 TRILLION in unfunded liabilities due to SS, prescription drug programs and medicare liability.

our gdp is about 14 trillion a year. we would have to tax our entire gdp for a decade to pay this off. a realistic tax increase that the democrats want will do nothing to touch our problem except hurt the economy even more. the hour is later than most people know or are willing to admit.

the only other solution outside of spending cuts would be to print money to pay this off. that would cause hyper inflation and probably destroy our currency and economy in the process. right now the only feasible solution is to cut spending there's just no way around it. tax increases remain a laughable solution to solve this.

the tea party is the only group showing any signs of sanity when it comes to our economic problems.

 

(1) that leaves the grotesque levels of defense spending off the table. when it comes up from the libertarian set, it's usually in the form of some throwback to pre-world war 1 isolationism--which wasn't even realistic when it got its name in the 20s-30s.

(2) it views existing debt as static. that is fundamentally wrong. but its a peculiarity of conservative thinking to frame the state as an object as over against framing it as a process. that way, all dynamism gets attributed to the market. which makes no sense.

(3) it excludes a priori tax increases. it also excludes moves to regulate transnational capital flows in order to shut down ways that tnc avoid paying taxes.

(4) so it frames all variables in an indefensible way to arrive at its conclusions about spending as *the* problem

(5) from which follows the opposition to things the social benefits of which are very considerable, like a coherent health care system. if you oppose health care reform, man up and talk about how the children of poorer people deserve limited access to health care and higher mortality rates because they're poor. don't dick around with talk about some imaginary "fiscal responsibility"---own the position that you're taking.

(6) because the state is construed as static, it also follows that the right cannot even begin to consider alternative policy alternatives available to the state to spur economic expansion in new areas--which would result in additional tax revenues. this follows from the view that the state is an object. the bizarre thing is that state action has been fundamental to **all** major economic expansions, directly or indirectly, since world war 2. (the dot.com thing woulda never happened without darpa, for example)

(7) the problem of currency is a ron paul quirk. the call to return to the gold standard is entirely unrealistic. but it provides folk an aesthetic pleasure of imagining that stability is possible. i'm not interested particularly in these problems. i don't consider ron paul serious in this regard.

 

addendum to no. 1: at least 40% of federal outlays. you don't put that on the table, you aren't serious. period.

addendum the second: the political problems with the tea party extend beyond the loopy libertarian/ron paul economics. there's the paranoia about the cities, about the "elite" which is "elite" because they---rightly to my mind--don't take tea party positions seriously because their basis is entirely fucked up. a bad framework can lead even the most logical person to bad conclusions. the frame is the problem with the tea party.

at the same time, i think it's likely polemical to make the claim in the op.
but even romney sounded like some incoherent ultra-conservative when he was desperately sucking up to iowa conservatives.....

 

well we all know the one tea party candidate who is serious about that 40%, something even the democrats clearly aren't serious about.

currency problems aren't a 'quirk'. currency problems can destroy an entire countries economy. while returning to the gold standard might be unrealistic now, printing dollars to pay off debts is not a healthy practice. we are the worlds reserve currency, that helps our economy. countries are now dropping dollars as our financial problems worsen. sound currency and sound economies tend to go hand and hand.

honestly, your point about tnc's escaping taxes i actually agree with you on. the problem is i dont trust the government to raise taxes. everytime they propose legislation some bs is included that usually hurts the middle class. the tnc's grasp on the government is too tight to allow them to take the short end of the stick on any tax increase legislation.

i'll stop 'dicking' around with fiscal responsibility. i know it's pc and socially responsible to think everyone can have access health care, education and everything. it's not based in reality, and being able to pay for all of it isn't based in reality either. no one every offers a realistic explanation of how we are to pay for all this other than increase taxes, but i've looked at the numbers for this solution and they just aren't there. the entitlement programs have us by the hook so bad there's almost no way to possibly pay them off.

you propose the ridiculous scenario between poor kids dieing or an entitlement system that will lead to an economic crash, instead of facing the reality of the inability to possibly fund these programs. well played.
--- merged: Aug 14, 2011 at 10:48 PM ---

you do of course know the story of ron paul's medical practice? he gave care to people whether they could pay or not.

he quit his practice because government became too intrusive for him to run his practice how he saw fit. people forget churches and physicians used to deal with this.

 

It is not just the fiscal extremism of the Tea Party and the unwillingness to compromise on the need for revenue increases that has turned people off. It is the demand for "smaller government" in the form of abolishing the EPA, overturning the health care reform (with no proposed alternative) and the recently enacted Wall Street reform regulations and gutting the regulatory system across the board. It is also defending big oil and dismissing the need for a more balanced energy policy, with investments in clean energy technology.

But the Republican problem goes deeper than that. It the also the demand by social conservatives for Constitutional amendments to ban abortion and define marriage as only between a man and a woman, and issues like immigration reform where providing a path to citizenship for those already here is not an option they will consider.

As much as the Independents and the center voters are dissatisfied with Obama and the Democrats, the Republicans have moved so far right, they are on the wrong side of every one of the above issues and their positrons do not represent the direction that most American want to see for the country.