It's tea party time again, and the rabble-rousers are out in force. Tiresomely so.
They offer little besides pointless rants. They scream about taxes being too high, but don't recognize that about half of households in the US pay no net taxes. The ones that do rant about paying taxes for someone else. But they seldom inconvenience themselves with facts.
The simple facts are that individuals pay some of the lowest taxes as a percentage of GDP in about 50 years. Corporations, who whine incessantly about taxes pay less than they have since 1936. The dollar amount may be more, but their income has gone up geometrically since then, thus the taxes.
I don't like paying taxes any more than anyone else. But I realize that without them, my partner might not have medical coverage through the VA. Or my mother's Social Security check might not show up.
Americans are taxed at a lower rate than most industrialized counties. 25-30% is the norm for them. Plus VAT taxes.
The average tax rate in the US is under 7%. Since we have one of the highest poverty levels of any industrialized first-world country, we collect less tax per person than just about anybody.
We also have the dubious distinction of having one of the highest rates of the “working poor” of any modern country. The “working poor” often do not pay any taxes. Because they have no money. It might be evidence of a progressive tax system, but it doesn’t pay the rent.
Those are the facts, inconvenient as they might be.
I pay more than that, but I also live above the poverty level. Jesus said that "for everyone to whom much is given, of him shall much be required." (Luke 12:48)
I can't argue with Him. One seldom wins arguments with a deity.
That religious belief translates into a political position.
Any time any politician has tried to take power from corporate interests, the corporations have launched fear campaigns aimed at the sheep who largely make up the Tea Party movement. They believe the half-truths and out-right lies that come from the right. They don’t question the disinformation or even think about the broader picture.
They may have some education, but I'm left to wonder what good came from educating them to be sheep. They seem to lack the perspective that leads to independent thought. I was taught in college to be an independent thinker. That quality is the primary benefit of education.
Personally, I'm mad as hell at what has happened to our economy and how it happened. The last administration turned a blind eye to the avalanche about to bury us. Greed ran unregulated and unchecked. People lost their jobs, their homes, their cars and everything else they had. They still are, but at a slower pace than last month.
They had to start over again, whether they were 30 or 60 years old.
But I am not a sheep. I will go back to the New Testament again: "Having eyes, see you not? and having ears, hear you not? and do you not remember?" (Mark 8:18) I was not raised to be a sheep, and I won't ever be one. My parents did a better job than they probably wanted to: I question every thing and want to get to the truth, not just to the "easy". I’m what they call in the South “mouthy”.
Easy blame is flying down the streets these days. It's almost a traffic hazard. And the primary proponents and instigators of it are the corporations and corrupt politicians who spin dishonesty and greed into a good thing. But I hate to tell all the Gordon Gekko’s, “Greed is not good”.
It pollutes the soul. It corrupts the mind. It distorts reality. It does nothing to edify the individual or benefit the larger society that we belong to, whether we want to acknowledge that we belong to one or not.
My well-being is tied to my neighbor's well-being. Theirs is tied to their neighbors'. At the end of the day, I live in the middle of a massive web of interdependence. As do we all.
If you want to protest, set up camp outside Goldman-Sachs, the surviving investment bank that will become the paradigm of greed and fraud that got us where we are. If you can find AIG (since they conveniently got rid of all signage everywhere), sit at their front door. Find a Lehman's executive and camp out across the street to keep him company during his early, unexpected retirement.
Those are the real villains in this horror story; that a small group of old men screwed an entire national economy and an entire nation befuddles me, still.
If you want to vent, vent on them and not on the people who are trying to pick up the pieces and look out for your best interests. Quit whining and do something constructive. Recognize and deal with the bitter irony that the rabid deregulation that began with Reagan led us to this point: right off the cliff into the proverbial abyss.
Assign blame where it's due. Don't be sheep. That's the easiest but ultimately most insincere path.
Have your tea party and then tell me what you accomplished. What did you do? Other than cost everyone else money to provide protection so you could rant? What accomplishments do you have to show for your rabble-rousing?
Go after the people who created the problem, not the ones that are trying to fix it.
Be mad, but be careful where you direct your anger. Go after the real problem, not the easy target. Do something that matters. Don’t just bitch. Do what is difficult and not simply what is convenient.
I’m mad, myself. In the words of the immortal Dixie Chicks, “I’m not ready to make up. I’m not ready to make nice. I’m mad as hell, and I won’t take it any more.” That anger leads me to support financial reform, but it doesn’t come between me and common sense. I can be pissed off about the bailouts while recognizing that they were necessary to keep the entire global economy from imploding.
If the TP movement had any substance, it would look beyond anger and see the “what-if-not” reality. It would be focusing on providing solutions instead of simply ranting. It would be constructive, not destructive. It would seek to thoughtfully edify, not recklessly tear down.
To date, it has done nothing positive. It refuses to recognize the complexity of the financial crisis or where its origins lie. It refuses to recognize that a total meltdown was averted. That the country is in much better shape than it was a year ago.
In the words of Shakespeare, “it is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
As I said, I’m mad, but I’m not an idiot. I know how and why the economy collapsed, more so than I want to. And I know why bailouts were necessary. Distasteful, but necessary. I had to swallow a lot of bile when it became abundantly clear that, without intervention, the entire financial system in the US would collapse, dragging the global economy down with it.
I didn’t like it, and still don’t, but intervention was the lesser of two evils.
The effects of not bailing out AIG, Citigroup, Bank of America, GM, Chrysler and others would have been catastrophic. The markets would have remained in free-fall for much longer than they did, and ordinary people would not have recovered billions and possibly trillions in losses to retirement portfolios.
Extraordinary times have always called for extraordinary actions. That is not a new concept. It goes back as far as recorded history. But it’s one that the TPer’s refuse to accept. Or, perhaps, have never considered. I have to wonder sometimes what dark closet they stumbled out of with no historical frame of reference.
And I also wonder how many of them have consistently done their duty to vote. If they are so virulently opposed to apparently everyone in elected office, where were they when the votes to elect them were being cast? I have voted since I could because I’ve believed it gives me a legitimate place from which to bitch about politicians I don’t like. I didn’t vote for them. But I voted. So I’m entitled to bitch.
This mess that we’re all trying to put back together didn’t get to be a mess overnight. It is the byproduct of lax oversight meeting overt greed. The house of cards we started building 10 years ago couldn’t support its own weight and finally collapsed. It took the economy with it.
Franklin Roosevelt had a tough re-election after his first term. We were not yet at war, and the Depression was still raging. During that time, he invented the “fire-side chats” to talk directly to the American people by radio, a technology that was in its infancy. He baby-sat an entire country through the worst financial disaster in its history. He was the Cheerleader-in-Chief.
That’s why I voted for Obama. Not because of policy, although I believed healthcare was important and needed to addressed directly. I voted for him because of his message of hope. By the time of the primaries, I could see that we were on the precipice of a disaster. Things were bad, but I knew they were going to get worse.
We needed hope, and he offered it.
To the Tea Party, I would say that either you elected them or you didn’t vote. That you have unrealistic expectations from a government that you either voted for or didn’t. (One’s as bad as the other.) That you helped get us into this mess but want to blame it on everyone else now that the tea is ready to serve.
Cuppa?
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