Thursday, April 16, 2009
Politics / Woods Tea Party Squabbling
Posted by Jeff Woods on Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 8:05 AM
People came together at "Tea Parties" across the state today, complaining that they pay too much in taxes. They must not have checked their paychecks recently. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, passed by Congress and signed by President Obama, included the Making Work Pay Tax Credit. It's the fastest and broadest tax cut in American history (yet, amazingly, no Tennessee Republican voted for it).To which, the GOP responds:
Tennessee Democrat Party Chairman Chip Forrester just doesn't get it. Forrester today criticized Tennesseans who attended one of the Tax Day Tea Party rallies across the state today and implied they just don't understand what's good for them. Perhaps the Tennessee Democrat chairman believes his fellow Tennesseans are short-sighted and selfish enough that they can be bribed to back Obama's economic policies for a few dollars a week. The people who gathered at two dozen Tax Day Tea Parties across Tennessee yesterday are made of better stuff than that. They know that $13 a week comes at a horrendous cost that their children and their grandchildren should not be forced to bear.
Comments (11)
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horrendous cost that their children and their grandchildren
Then they should have agreed to pay for that war they started.
Tennesseans are short-sighted and selfish enough that they can be bribed to back [insert GOP President]'s economic policies for a few dollars a week.
It worked for Bush.
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I'm so thrilled to see signs of life from TNDP.
As for the TNGOP response, a handful of people that haven't gotten over McCain's loss gathered yesterday to piss and moan. Big deal.
Most Tennesseans, Mr. Hobbs, are pleased to see our government working to counter the disastrous economic policies of George W. Bush - the very economic policies that you and your candidates for governor want to foist on us.
Tennesseans are a lot smarter than that.
This pains me greatly but ...Nice to see Chip blaming the idiot Bushies who got us into this global economic mess. (As opposed to blaming senior elected Democrats for the sorry state of his political party.)
It's a simple, compelling and entirely accurate narrative: The Republicans got us into this mess and damn near ruined the country in the process. TNDP needs to repeat that over and over again-- paint a big effin A on thier back and never let up. Data, charts and graphs are easy to come by that visibly bear this out. Ignore Hobbs and those goofballs. Forget everything else. Remind everyone how we got here-- and keep them on the run. May we never go through another eight years like that again.
Uh, the seed of the banking crisis was the government (Democrat Congress) forcing banks to loan to people who wouldn't normally qualify under standard criteria, thus higher RISK. I saw a black lady on TV whose house was being foreclosed on. What was in the driveway? An Escalade. Bling.
What I'm about to write might seem mean-spirited, but... the only people who should invest in the stock market are people who understand the stock market. If you put your money on autopilot, you deserve what you get, bottom line.
The collapse of the derivatives market? Sure, I'm in favor of tighter regulation. It's one of President Clinton's biggest regrets. You really want to bail these people out?
Obama's budget is 25% of GDP. It's unsustainable. This nation has $60 TRILLION in unfunded liabilites. The financial system isn't merely in crisis, people. It's a goddamn paper charade! Where are your social security dollars? Privitization is starting to sound good.
Chip Forrester says that the Tea Party offers no solutions, it only says no. The message, however subtle, is there: live within your means, Comrade.
"Uh...Chris Dodd and Barney Frank....nuff said"
No, not "nuff" said. And the seed wasn't planted because the Democratic congress, which didn't take office until Jan. 2007, forced banks to loan to unqualified people. That is patently not true, but is a common talking point on right-wing radio and the conservative blogosphere. This happened because banks and other lending institutions got greedy with the easy profits they were making and the federal government decided it didn't want to regulate any of it. Dodd and Frank are as guilty as any in that they took lobbyist money to look the other way but trying to pin this all on Democrats, and absolving people like Bush, Delay, Gingrich, et al, is ridiculous. And again, all of you "tea partiers", who only seem to care about government waste when the Democrats are in power, continue to look like nothing more than Republican loyalists and Obama haters, not concerned citizens.
I won't argue with your thesis on deficit spending, Joe. As a general rule, you're right, and I'm not smart enough to know if all these bailouts A) prevented the collapse of the economy last fall or B) will get us out of this mess. It's hard to knock anyone who's advocating living within one's means.
But one thing that's pure fallacy is banks being pressured to make risky loans. It's indeed true on a limited scale with the quasi-government lenders, but not at all correct with the vast majority of loans, which came from private industry. Go back and reread your history, my friend. Banks and mortgage companies were making huge, huge profits on the subprime market. They all jumped in simply because they could rake in monster fees and interest rates far higher than conventional mortgages, and the dopes on Wall Street were playing the uber bookie, taking everyone's bad layoff bets. It began in the last years of Clinton, and heavily accelerated under Bush.
So while the conservative movement's "debt is for morons" campaign would seem to have universal appeal, I think smart conservatives like you shoot yourselves in the foot by continually trotting out this revisionist history. This problem lays solidly at the feet of the financial industry, with assists from the regulatory arms of the Bush and Clinton administration for not jumping in. To give these guys a pass, to say they were "forced," is to give a victim out to the very people who screwed us.
I'm just saying...
"The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, passed by Congress and signed by President Obama, included the Making Work Pay Tax Credit. It's the fastest and broadest tax cut in American history"
It's a piddly nothing that will get swallowed up by the inflation created by printing trillons of dollars for the spending orgy and the energy tax on everybody that will be created by the carbon cap and trade scheme.
And what is this "making work pay" crap?
Work already pays - it's what you get for it from your employer or from your business or whatever. It's just typical liberal democrat crap spewed to justify redistribuion : so and so didn't "really" earn his pay so we're going to take it away from him and give it to someone who did.
Not a one of them has ever accomplished anything in their lives that proves they are a superior judge of the value of an activity, product or service than the marketplace is.
