Tea Party is the cure not the cause

Matt McCarten writes in the HoS:

US counts financial costs of tea partiers

More damage was done to capitalism this week than any communist revolutionary could have ever dreamed possible.

Matt has it all wrong. The drop in the markets isn’t because Tea Party supported Congressman insisted on spending cuts. It is because the spending cuts did not go far enough to stop US debt growing. The massive deficit and debt is due to a series of Presidents and Congresses spending way more money than they had. Clinton was the one near exception.

Everyday Americans, sick of both parties, rose up and said no more spending increases we can’t afford. Thanks to them, the US may one day get back into surplus – but it is a long time off.

Anyway I would have thought Matt would have liked the Tea Party – like his UNITE union, they don’t like paying taxes. The difference is the Tea Party campaigns to change the law, while UNITE simply takes its employees PAYE tax and spends it elsewhere, rather than passing it onto the IRD as required by law.

The country’s official unemployment is more than 9 per cent and is people’s number one concern. Poll after poll show people want more expenditure on jobs, health and education. Yet the tea partiers – funded by the super wealthy – have forced the Obama administration to cut these three items.

Until now every sane economist will tell a government to spend money when an economy needs to grow. This country is going in the opposite direction.

The 9% unemployment rate came after the biggest spend-up in history. Obama asked for and got a huge fiscal stimulus, in the hundreds of billions. He claimed it would stop unemployment reaching 7%. Instead it made 10%. The myth that the Government can spend itself out of trouble has been dispelled by the evidence.

If that isn’t enough Obama has a Supreme Court with a majority of Republican appointees approving laws allowing corporations to give unlimited amounts of secret funding to politicians.

Not secret. Simply companies in the US, are like companies in NZ. They have to disclose their donations, but there is no limit on them.