Quote:
Originally Posted by MarchHare
Yeah, this is why Tea Party members are being completely dishonest about their desire for a balanced budget. The US could cut every single program except Social Security, Defense, Medicare, and Medicaid to near-zero funding levels and the federal government would still have a budget deficit.
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Using your point as a springboard, I would submit that they're not dishonest but rather ill-informed. This is an extremely self-reinforcing movement*, and much of the "truths" are perpetuated by and within the organization**. This is why you hear them rail against foreign aid and PBS and other little minutiae: they actually do think these are significant to the budget. They're simply re-stating mantras (which they
know are true) and are therefore not interested in doing the work of exposing their thoughts to scrutiny. So that's a roundabout way of saying that they are indeed honest, just not intellectually rigorous.
The other defense I would make is that the Tea Party has actually made tangible change to the Republican platform. Depending on your political stance you may not agree with this change in Republican party priorities, however it does represent a democracy at work. I would argue that this exposes the weakest part of the Democrat side of the political scale: their voting constituency has not been able to make a meaningful impact on Democratic politics despite coming out in large numbers in 2008***.
In that way, I think that the Right demonstrates a more meaningful example of the fluidity of democracy than does the Left.
* All politics are like this to an extent. Democrats thinking you can pump money into social programs to fix them, Republicans thinking that any tax cut stimulates the economy, etc...
** This type of perpetuation can fetishize an inability to do basic budgetary accounting, but within the Tea party it definitely has an ugly side in the form of their xenophobia.
*** I'm hard pressed to name any meaningful steps taken by Obama to halt the erosion of civil liberties that is taking place in the US. At the behest of the right and the cowardice of the left, he's actually perpetuated the downward moral spiral begun by GWB.