The Tea Party came into being as a reaction to Republican complicity in bailouts of all sorts: of Wall Street firms, and of irresponsible mortgage borrowers. Occupy, and the potty-trained version of that movement led by Elizabeth Warren, demands more bailouts: of people who borrowed money for college or to buy a home, of fashionable corporations that do not want to pay market rates for financing, etc. Senator Warren is an energetic proponent of corporate welfare for Boeing, General Electric Bechtel, Caterpillar, and other such poor, defenseless little mom-and-pop operations.If you are looking for actual rather than theoretical opposition to bailouts and corporate welfare, then your choices include Senator Rand Paul and Senator Ted Cruz, but practically nobody who might be called a progressive.
Of course the far left do nothing but posture every time a budget like this gets passed, and the idea that there is some type of opposition coalition forming between activists on opposite sides is ludicrous. I have pretty much turned into someone who is not particularly fond of the Tea Party movement, mainly because they seem to get in the way of the kind of consensus in the GOP that is required to move the right agenda forward. It doesn't help that I get some very pushy fundraising calls and emails from different Tea Party groups, nor that I know more than most conservatives would like to know about the Patriots/Express lawsuit.
It'll be interesting to see which progressive rats discover the nutritional value of which of their fellows if the Republicans manage to succeed in closing some of the current escape valves from some of the more ideologically dissolute Democrat economic practices like SSDI expansion fraud, welfare for foreign nationals, etc.
ReplyDeleteI'm the opposite of you regarding Tea Party. I'm more along the lines of Part I of this guy's post. Yeah, there are pushy fundraising calls, emails, etc. -- which means they're not as smooth as the Karl Rove PACs' calls and emails, I guess.
ReplyDeleteI shudder at your phrase "the right kind of consensus in the GOP" because what the Ruling Class Republicans mean by the "right kind of consensus" is far different than what you mean, Pauli. And their kind of "right kind" is what it would turn into, as it always has.
At this point, if it's not Ted Cruz or Rick Perry talking, I'm not much interested.
What do you make of this?
DeleteA small start.
DeleteI'm guessing that it also required the so-called government shutdown and the resulting "sequester" to do even that little bit. Which we hear from the GOP leadership is to be avoided at all costs today, lest more conservatives be elected in 2016 like they were this time, I guess.
We will make no real progress on cutting the size and breadth of the federal government until we eliminate entire functions. Until then, reductions such as those will be welcome, but insufficient. And I worry about interest rates creeping up.
BTW, the outlays in 2008 were "only" $2.982 triillion (from the chart cited in that piece) -- which is an ocean away from the cut from $3.60 trillion to $3.45 trillion noted in that piece.
We will make no real progress on cutting the size and breadth of the federal government until we eliminate entire functions.
ReplyDeleteThis is something Romney wanted to do. He wanted to eliminate redundancies and consolidate (eliminate) departments.
That's good, and I wish he would have won. But my thought is different -- eliminate entire functions, not just reducing the number of departments carrying out functions.
DeleteDept of Education is the prime example. There is no Article I power of Congress to enact such a thing. It's just been shoehorned in under the spending clause.
Ditto all of the discretionary budget. When you have an hour, I recommend this talk by Sen. Buckley on that topic.
From Mark Steyn today:
ReplyDeleteBut there's no point to heading off the cliff in third gear, which is basically the position a lot of Republican Senators are wedded to. They're happy to go along in the same direction as the Democrats, they just want to shift down a gear. And that's not good enough. That's not good enough.
and:
The president's idea of law is what you can get away with. And so he figures he can get away with this immigration amnesty, and that what he can get away with trumps the U.S. Constitution. And he's right about that, because when [Texas Senator] Ted Cruz had his vote, he lost 74-22..
It's not just a policy difference. It is about whether the president has the right to do it. Whether he's acting beyond the law like some Latin-American caudillo, or Kim Jong-Un when he has one of his uncles executed over in Pyongyang, or some of these other one-man states. The president thinks it's a one-man state and what he does trumps what the legislature does. And 74 of the 100 United States Senators agree with that.
Exactly. Business as usual ....
I think what the prezzie really wanted for Christmas was a shutdown. And he's not going to get it.
Delete