When the Tea Party tones it down, it's still mistaken.

[alexpshenichkin]

This BBC profile of a handful of "Tea Partiers" manages to make them all sound fairly reasonable. Which is what makes it a useful look at why the movement is fundamentally misguided.

"I don't think it makes sense to spend our way out of recession. And the trillions we have spent haven't helped - unemployment is still high and small businesses are

Comments

[rose_garden]

"If the only way you can imagine your business succeeding is in a world of no taxes and no minimum wage, maybe you just suck at this."

Oh SNAP!

[mumbly_joe]

You forgot to mention the thing where "small businesses" are most often defined by number of employees, and thus do usually include a number of "corporations" that exist mainly to minimize the tax burdens of one or a handful of individuals. Bristol Palin, for example, is a "small business owner", in all technicality. And, without getting into the issue of whether it's ethical or proper to game the tax code to minimize individual burdens (I'm somewhat sympathetic to either side of that argument), one thing that is safe to conclude is that the existence of these "small businesses" does not actually create value automatically.

Also, in fairness to guy #4, he's still very wrong, but I can kinda understand why he'd get things wrong: there are a handful of programs that impose mandates on the states, typically whilst also giving them funding to carry out those mandates. The most obvious examples would be Medicare and now the Affordable Health Care for America Act (what happened to legislation with pithy acronyms?! I WANT MY COUNTRY

[mumbly_joe]

Also, economics rant for a second:

If you don't think you can spend your way out of a recession, than you shouldn't think tax cuts work, either. Either way, you're doing deficit spending. The actual real-life debate between economists is whether fiscal tools work at all. I happen to think that monetarists, who argue that they don't and might even be counterproductive, are deeply misguided and have been proven wrong by history time and again, but that's a side-issue: the main point is, if spending doesn't work, tax cuts definitely don't work, and if tax cuts work, then spending works at least as well. Both of the above positions are logically consistent, because they are couched in the same economic theory.

The notion that government spending doesn't do anything, but tax cuts do, is idiocy propagated by Reaganites and inherently logically-inconsistent and I can't tell you how fucking sick I am of seeing people say things like this.

[mumbly_joe]

A related rant of mine is about people who say "The New Deal didn't end the Depression, the War did". Not in the sense that I necessarily disagree (lack of political will made the New Deal tragically half-assed, not unlike the ARRA), but rather in the sense that they seem to be claiming that our mobilized economy was a laissez-faire system of tax cuts and economic deregulation, rather than, you know, a quasi-command program of government capital investment, paid for with deficit spending ("war bonds" simply being propagandistic government bonds, after all).

[ultranurd]

I saw some crazy linked via Andrew Sullivan that amounted to a proposal that our best way out of the recession is war with Iran: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/29/AR2010102907404.html

[mumbly_joe]

Yeah, I saw that, it was kind of amazingly terrible. Even worse than the violence he does to economics with the "war is magical and cures recessions, unlike other types of spending" meme is the fact that he is, in fact, promoting one of the mostly nakedly imperial notions I've ever seen in print: we should wage aggressive war against a country, because it will make us richer.

[ultranurd]

Also, I blame you for the thought "constitutional amendment slash fanfiction" into my brain. There is no subtext!

[alexpshenichkin]

Don't blame me, sir! You jumped to that yourself.