Monday, January 23, 2012

The Tea Party: In the Crosshairs



What follows is a comment I posted on Facebook after this cartoon showed up on my page. (I've tidied up the passage a bit for the blog).
"You will get very little argument from Tea Party folks about this cartoon. The Tea party supporters strongly maintain that Lawmakers need to be forced to live by the same laws they pass for the People. As it is, we are rapidly becoming feudal, and the more money we send to DC, the more empowered are our lords. Instead, why not keep more of the money in the states, where we have better access to our state level 'representatives' and a bigger voice in how our money is spent... and not spent. When money goes to DC, it simply becomes fodder for the unending power grab, a vehicle for passing out goodies to other states for projects that 99% of the people in the US couldn't care less about nor benefit from.  But you can bet it benefits the politicians big time, because these favors aren't forgotten. And these are conservative and liberal favors. I can't control what a NY or CA U.S. Congressmen  vote   to spend money on, but I can get the attention of my representatives at the state level. We need to quit labeling each other and denigrating one another based on political beliefs... because it is pure bigotry to do so. As citizens we need to share ideas amongst ourselves that work toward solving these problems instead of bickering and backbiting like a bunch of highschool girls, and terminate our fantasy that our political system and its instruments will suddenly 'see the light' and find their way to doing the very hard things that need  to be done. The system is corrupt (and broke).... and the best way to cure it is to starve it down to a controllable size. If you like the status quo and the crony capitalism, then by all means, raise taxes and send more money to DC so the politicians can continue to feed your tax money to the corporate bandits, the 'too big to fail' financial entities, car companies, etc. Its just not my cup of tea.