The Tea Party and the Debt Ceiling Compromise

The Tea Party did an excellent job in the budget debate forcing politicians to cut spending.
Finally, defense and health care, two industries whose outsized salaries and profits have for far too long been overly subsidized by taxpayers will likely be scaled back when Republicans refuse to tax wealthy people and corporations more come this Thanksgiving. Even higher education funding was recalibrated to emphasize helping poorer kids go to college whose own families cannot financially help them get an education.
Further, very few of the spending cuts come into effect before 2013, thus appropriately assisting the economy with government spending now and decreasing government spending when the economy will likely improve somewhat; hence the Republicans joined the Democrats in the efficacy of Keynsian economics.
Where the Tea Party failed the country is that it prevented the government, for the first time, from telling all of us that we will have to give more and take less, and that we will all have to become givers instead of takers.
There is precious little established economic data to show that allowing rich people and companies to keep more of their accumulated money is the best way to spur job creation and economic growth. It was the Tea Party’s insistence on its ideology of allowing people to keep what they earned, instead of helping others in gaining economic opportunity for themselves, that prevented agreement on the much better and larger compromise that President Obama and the Democrats offered. Telling elderly folks and retirees that the rest of us no longer can afford to treat you so well for so long, especially when it comes to unlimited access to the world’s most expensive health care system and telling rich people and companies that we can no longer permit the greatest degree of income inequality in the U.S. since the 1920s, the era of Al Capone, and before that, the late 19th century, the time of the economically and politically powerful Robber Barons, is what is needed. We didn’t get it.
In this way, the Tea Party failed us miserably and people’s frustration should not be directed at government in general but at Tea Party members and their fellow economic arch-conservatives.
This is Randy Feldman on WCRN’s Midday Report. August 2, 2011.