It's Elementary

I suggested yesterday that the Tea Partiers and their friends essentially want to starve the federal government by ending all taxation. That isn't as far-fetched a conclusion as it might seem, as I discovered during my weekly visit to Watching America. One of the major themes this week is the world-wide financial turmoil and the source of much of it.

Most directly on point with the argument I was making yesterday was this opinion piece by Diane Francis in the financial section of Canada's National Post. Ms. Francis notes that the US and Greece have deficit problems for the same reason: the two governments don't collect enough taxes for the programs their citizens insist on.

Essentially, the two are frighteningly similar. The Greeks, with their tear gas and Molotov cocktails, refuse to give up entitlements or pay for them through taxation and are simply a violent version of the havoc that the US Congress is wreaking. But the US anti-taxers do “violence” against people by allowing those making $250,000 a year or more to pay less tax, through Bush loopholes, than does a single parent mother in Baltimore or a soldier in Afghanistan. ...

...The United States sputters in large measure because its politicians have lousy credit ratings which impedes job creation and activity and helps explain the lack of investment, credit or the inability to finance the building of infrastructure through private-public partnerships. American governments are lousy bets because they don’t or cannot collect enough taxes to pay their bills.

I think that states the problems both countries face quite nicely. The Tea Party contingent wants government to quit spending money, yet many showed up at town hall meetings after the passage of the health care reform bill astride their Medicare provided scooters. The GOP wants corporate taxes lowered to stimulate the economy and to create jobs even though that tactic hasn't ever worked and certainly won't this time as the multinationals are outsourcing everything they can to other countries.

Austerity, the new mantra of the tax cutters, takes away the purchasing power of the citizenry, which takes out the need for more employees to build the goods or provide the services that otherwise would have been bought. By starving the beast, the Tea Party contingent would destroy the economic underpinnings of the country it pretends to revere.

Morons. Evil and ignorant morons, every last one of them.