The following information comes from
the Center for America Progress blog site which you can access at the following
address/link for the full story which I believe is well worth reading in its
entirety. The title of the piece is “What If the Tea Party Wins?” It gives a
very complete analysis of just what the agenda of the Tea Party is, what it is
based upon, and its implications. Some of this I hinted in the previous article
which I wrote before finding this blog.
The work of the Tea Party is vividly
depicted as work that threatens the Republic as we know it. We are aware of Rep
Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) to phase out Medicare and that many others view the
constitution a very limited way that would eliminate most of the social
progress of the 20th century. This is the list the blog cites as
some of the things that would disappear under their constitution
interpretation.
§ Social Security and Medicare
§ Medicaid, children's health insurance, and other health care
programs
§ All federal education programs
§ All federal antipoverty programs
§ Federal disaster relief
§ Federal food safety inspections and other food safety
programs
§ Child labor laws, the minimum wage, overtime, and other labor
protections
§ Federal civil rights laws
The Tea Party focuses upon the 10th
Amendment (tentherism). “The powers not
delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the
States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people”
Again, I encourage to go to the link to get all the
particulars on who this works.
Ian Millhiser, the author of this piece, concludes this
desire to repeal the work of the 20th century is not new, Eisenhower
described them 60 years ago, “Their numbers [were] negligible and they are
stupid.”
The problem is they are no longer small
numbers and they threaten practically everyone in the country.
I believe it is the worst form of radicalism
this country has ever seen. This misled and delusional group has been used well
as a pawn of the ultra rich in the country to spread continued fear and their
tight grip on all elected officials.
Read the link and decide for yourself.
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/09/tea_party_constitution.html
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/09/tea_party_constitution.html
The answer to the 'what if' is simply, they must NOT win. The results are simply too unthinkable. They must. Not. Win.
ReplyDeleteThe increasing extremism is partly a result of the accumulated failure of supply-side economics, which has demonstrated itself to be an abysmal failure. It is suffering from 'catastrophic success'. We did free trade, high-income tax cuts, deregulation, the whole playbook, under both Republican and Democratic presidents, and none of it worked out. In the long term it just resulted in more wealth concentration, and by symmetry more debt, with the resulting decaying living standards.
But when you have no new ideas and your old ideas have had catastrophic results, you can either try to learn from the mistakes, or you can just go off and live in an alternate reality such as tentherism or some other ism rooted in logical paralysis.