Columnist Lowell Grant, ever the enlightened progressive, sees demonizing as a Tea Party political exclusive. I wonder if he has actually talked to members of this loosely defined movement or is he just spouting the party line? What scares both Democrats and Republicans about such a movement is that they don”t control it and can”t seem to kill it off through their usual array of media lackeys on the far left and far right. The reason conservatives can better identify with the themes of less government, less taxes and a whole lot less spending that the Tea Party generally espouses, is that in its untainted ideological form conservatism also holds such values highly important.
Mr. Grant”s perspective seems to be that demonizing is just fine as long as you aim it in the right direction. I hate to be the one to break the bad news to him, but with a $14 trillion dollar long-term national debt, in truth a monument to the failure of both major political parties, eventually you must raise taxes intolerably to finance the interest on debt that is annually rolled over with interest compounding. In 2009, interest payments alone on this national debt were $389 billion and the 2010 projection is one-half trillion dollars (treasurydirect.gov). Looking at California, government is on the hook for $600 billion, a debt burden extending years into the future equaling seven times the size of our annual state budget.
Why would anyone support simply raising taxes as a solution without some real constraint and debt reduction on the spending side? The movement is borne of people upset by a dysfunctional government that destroys our children and grandchildren”s futures and leaves them taxed to oblivion. Oh, that”s right, we can just take it from the “rich.” With a little luck we can snuff out small and medium business owners nationwide in the process, while destroying creativity and rewarding dependency. That will create lots of jobs. Let”s not forget 200,000 of the new jobs created thus far by all this “stimulating” are in the federal government! Who needs private sector jobs when we can just keep growing government?
I am sure that any populist movement will have fringe lunatics attached to it. Don”t the major parties also have such members? Isolating on that fringe is becoming the favorite tactic to discredit the whole movement. I suspect the real motivation is to kill what cannot be controlled by either party. After all, they have had the playing field all to themselves for many generations and do not share power gracefully. They have carefully cultivated hordes of special interest groups on both sides of the line. In the end, they have bought us with our own money and then had us pay interest on it. The movement is borne of frustration and anger at the greed and stupidity of those we trusted to run our affairs in a sane manner, and our chagrin towards ourselves for not waking up sooner.
Jerry Nicoletti
Kelseyville
