Only 2% of Tea Partisans realize Obama cut taxes

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Other interesting notes on the Tea Partisans*:



While I wouldn't deny that the Tea Party initally was - and to some degree still is - a largely organic, popular movement of dissatisfied rightwing populists and right (propertarian) libertarians, they certainly do have a more Republican than independent tilt.
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* Retrieved from CBS- Poll:Who are the Tea Partiers?

I blame Rahm Emanuel for this, really. He is an idiot. I don't know if it was his idea to not talk about the tax cuts in a bid to fool people into thinking that the "real stimulus" was bigger than they thought - if I read that correctly. Moreover, they stupidly announced the stimulus days after they announced a big giveaway to banks, causing confusion between the two. So the Obama administration effectively promoted the confusion between the giveaway and the stimulus, and also decided to not talk about the tax cuts.

That said, for Teabaggers, the idea that Socialist Tax and Spend Communist Obama would lower their taxes would cause cognitive dissonance, so they were not inclined to believe it, even if they actually noticed it on their tax bills.

Rahm Emanuel is representative of all that is wrong with Democratic politics. His ties to financial industry robber barons alone should disqualify him from having the Presidents ear - nevermind his hawkish positions and decision to keep funding the Iraq War so Democrats could run against it.

If that weren't enough, he has the public image of a Machiavellian despite being neither shrewd nor effective at passing Democratic legislation.

The inability of the Democrats to run a message of progressive populism should scare you. Whenever the populace feels the brunt of economic hardship, they look for reasons. The cliche centrism of the Democratic Party mainstream fails to do this, but the rightwing populists do (albeit, providing the wrong answers). The New Right has persued increasingly pseudo-fascist ideas and the US may very well be seeing a situation like the germinative stages of rightwing ultranationalism in the Weimar Republic.

Seems to me that the Tea Partier's outrage is more focused on Spending than simply on taxes; after all, Obama is spending like a madman, and all of that money has to come from somewhere. If direct taxes are cut, what good does that do if we're just borrowing the difference from China (which must be paid in the future through tax increases, PLUS interest), or if the Federal Reserve prints up currency and revokes people's purchasing power by the 'hidden tax' called inflation. Seeing that both borrowing and printing have been increased quite a bit, a decrease in direct taxation hasn't decreased the flow of the people's purchasing power to the Government. It's a delusional fantasy to seriously believe the Government is taking less from the people and able to spend more without any consequences.

Rahm was an investment banker, is an Israeli citizen, was a member of the Israeli armed forces! No wonder he's the Chief of Staff, he represents the people who count in Washington!

That said, he is a bungler. The defeat of 1994 was his work, he claims that the Democrats don't have a base, he says that anyone against corporate giveaways is a "ret*d". The media crowned him king of the 2006 Democratic victory when in fact they won in spite of his bungling. His kennel of Blue Dogs was mostly defeated.

The depression of aggregate demand will prevent any inflation from taking place. The pressures are deflationary. The money used to pay deficits come from the usual place - from the computer keyboards that type up the figures! That's how the monetary system works - to find out more, read about Chartalism.

Private debt is a worse situation than public debt. When governments cut back to pay the deficit, the shortfall in the private economy is made up with private debt. The debt overhead becomes unsustainable over time. Private debt is what's ruining America, not public debt. Naturally the Obama administration and the "sensible middle" favours maintaining as much debt as possible and re-inflating bubbles.