Donald Trump’s new budget “puts the final nail in the tea-party coffin“. At first, you may think you should thank Donald Trump for finally getting rid of those pesky tea party politicians. However, there was nothing wrong with the stated goals of the tea party, the problem was that they were actually absolute hypocrites.
The “Tea Party” was formed to protest the huge and rising US national debt. The problem was that they suddenly decided to protest this, not when Saint Reagan raised the debt, or when both the Bush presidents raised the debt, they suddenly became fiscal conservatives just when Barack Obama got elected in the middle of a deep recession and (wisely) decided that government spending was the only way out of it (which worked).
The Tea Party was furious when Obama raised government spending by 3% during his first term in order to fix our cratering economy. But now, Trump is on track to raise government spending by 4%. Why is Trump raising spending when the economy (thanks Obama!) is doing just fine? And after Trump’s big tax cut for corporations and rich people?
During his campaign, Trump promised to pay off the national debt in eight years. He has already raised the national debt by $2 trillion, and he isn’t even done with his first (and hopefully only) term yet.
So are any tea partiers screaming this time? Hah! Let’s see, how about Ted Cruz, who was a leading voice in the tea party and strongly opposed raising the debt ceiling while Obama was in office? His response when asked about this? “Just call our press office“.
5 Comments
At some point in the recent past, I read that the Repub. long plan was to wait and blame Dems as the old “tax and spend” Democrat’s. With the passage of a new budget, it would seem they are on their way to setting that scene. Boy, the public sometimes seems to have the attention span of a flea!
The attention span of a flea and the memory of a chunk of schist. “>D
Don’t forget, Reagan was going to shrink gubmint. Instead he enlarged it, giving large sums of money to contractors as Federal jobs were turned over to private enterprise at the same time as the gubmint added Federal employees. SOS today.
For the record, the original Boston Tea Party was not about taxes, but against Monopolies. Many John Hancock was a smuggler, and the new price tea, even taxed, was less then before. Heavy sigh,just think what could happen if as much energy was spent working against the consolidation of business and how much better the world would be if the FCC had actual standards.
Boy, if it was only that simple. Actually, Dan, it was about both and the even deeper issue of taxation without representation. The Colonists were quite upset by the Townshend Acts which, among other things, imposed taxes on a number of goods, including tea, imported to the colonies: this on top of the Tea Act passed several years earlier. The British East India Company, which had a huge surplus of tea on hand, was allowed to directly transport tea to the Colonies, selling it at a much reduced rate which included the taxes levied. If colonists purchased said tea, they would, in effect, be paying taxes to the motherland which had been levied without their representation. The price was lowered in an attempt to undercut the Dutch who were smuggling tea into the Colonies. What a mess. It was a pretty significant political issue, not simply a gubmint support monopoly.
The tea party ONLY talks about taxes. Yes, I know taxes were involved as were many other factors including wanting to be treated as British with rights and representation,not colonists that do as they are told when they are told. We had a long history of self government before the revolution, another fact we seem to forget when we go about “spreading democracy” and then not understand when it doesn’t alway work.
Right now we are having some issues with it ourselves.
Below are references.
https://theparagraph.com/2008/04/boston-tea-party-hit-corporate-monopoly/
http://www.boston-tea-party.org/economic-causes.html