I have to admit, on the face of it, the so-called Tea Party
sounded like a good idea. A grass roots movement focused on cutting government
overspending and reducing the size and waste of the federal government. Sounds
good, right?
After all, if we set aside how we think the government
should spend its budget (taxpayer money for the most part), we can get behind
the idea that money should be spent efficiently and with care. Obviously we all
might think differently about governmental departments and spending, but we’ll
talk overall spending for a minute, not political differences.
So the Tea Party was born (more or less). The “Tea Party” is
actually not a single entity, but a scattering of like-minded groups that started
to pop up shortly after Obama was elected as a growing protest over his
spending plans. The Tea Party, therefore, has been largely tagged as a
Republican-based group. Never mind the fact that government spending spun wildly
out of control with George W. Bush in office, and while Republicans held both the
Senate and House. Neither party has shown much overall respect for the idea of
holding to a budget, unlike nearly every family in America wrestling with their
own budgets.
So the government, many people believe, overspends. (We’ll
leave that hanging on its own for now . . . with no political inserts or “this
department needs more” or “this department’s budget should be cut.”) If we accept
that the government does indeed overspend, is apparently incapable of reigning
in costs and expenses, and is blindly oblivious to its rising deficits, then maybe, so the theory went, we need a movement to stop those things.
Therein lies, at least in theory, the seed for the growth of
the Tea Party. Even if we skip over growing evidence that the idea of a Tea
Party movement was first proposed by the Koch brothers (in 2002) as a way to
cut government regulation (therefore business costs) and (paraphrasing) “return
the country to its citizens by cutting government and its influence,” the ideal idea seemed like a good one. Sounds
good, but the ultimate goals seemed to be, at that point, more about improving
their business environment than improving the federal budgeting process.
But when it started to rise, the multi-headed beast that
became the Tea Party as we know it today, took on the added weight of pushing a
“conservative” social agenda.
That approach grew. Now what once was supposed to be a non-social agenda movement
has evolved into what many see as a radical conservative pocket of political
discontent, willing to shut down the government over funding Planned Parenthood
based on manipulated videos and despite the fact that no investigation has
shown any wrong-doing regarding the use of fetal tissue. A political issue . .
. not a financial issue. This evolution has in part killed the political
discussions, debate and policy creation that marked much of our history.
An ebb and flow, compromise and debate is now yelling,
screaming, threatening, posturing, political roadblocks and a stalled political
process. On both sides.
It’s a shame, really. Many movements start with a goal in
mind, but that can change quickly. Any “let’s cut government over spending”
soon becomes let’s cut this and that, but not this. The movement starts to pick
and choose what it wants cut . . . let’s cut the EPA or Department of Education,
but not the military . . . or, oh, no, we can’t possibly make changes to Social
Security or Medicare . . . and on and on. These are fake conservatives . . . thoughtless, uninspired, and under producing.
Throw in a rigid social agenda (which has not a thing to do
with government spending) and you have a movement that has evolved into nothing
more than a narrow focused entity (or a flock of entities) that creates
nothing, has no policy direction or solutions to challenges that most
Americans see as important . . . jobs, education, taxes, income, retirement and
immigration . . . and now merely shouts demands.
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