People are discovering the tea party isn’t anything other than the lunatic fringe of the GOP:
After the tea party helped stake Texas Republicans to huge majorities in the state Legislature last fall, the Republicans had a curious response. They did not immediately take on the state’s $27 billion deficit; instead they considered a series of bills straight from the religious right’s playbook – antiabortion legislation foremost among them.
Even now, as the Legislature tackles the budget deficit, social issues are near the surface. A member of the tea party caucus proposed a budget amendment that calls for funding “family and traditional values centers” at some universities.
In November, the tea party swept candidates into Congress and statehouses on promises of setting America’s financial house in order. But today, the tea party’s track record suggests that a great reckoning is under way.
In places like Texas, where the religious right holds sway, the movement is moving to embody a broader conservative agenda. Elsewhere, tea partyers are striving to keep social issues from “ruining” the movement.
This was obvious several years ago to anyone with an IQ over room temperature.
Yutsano
That accounts for about three-quarters of the Village. So what’s the damage with the old folks?
PurpleGirl
We (liberals and progressives) tried to warn them. But they were so averse to anything we said, they wouldn’t listen. To a certain extent I want to say… votes have consequences. And if you don’t think your decisions through, you get what you deserve. Eat it.
amk
So a cage fight between teabagging nuts and religious nuts ?
El Tiburon
Texas Governor, the Holy Rev. Rick Lazarus Perry, hath done proclaimed that we shalleth prayeth for water to drench our arid plains. Can I get an amen!
Yet, he hath also forsaken us by requesting help from the Kenyan Beezelbub for the wildfires that God has given us in which to better cook our meat and chase the Murky-colored ditch diggers back across the Grande. (Used to be Rio Grande, but God took that water as well so that T. Boone Pickens could tithe! Can I get an amen!)
Lunatic fringe you sayeth? Just an average day in Texas politics.
Citizen_X
Oh, you think Perry and the Texas Teatards are a bunch of Christian-Right wackos? Shows what you know. Why, Governor Perry just demonstrated his dedication to finding real solutions to our problems by declaring three days of prayer for rain to slake our drought and fire-ravaged state. Perry’s on the case!
Edit: Ahh, El Tiburon got there first. But I put the link up! (Go see it, it’s official an’ everthang!)
El Tiburon
@amk:
Is this the definition of a circle jerk but with just one person?
PeakVT
Pretending that the teabaggers were a part of a new, organic movement is the worse thing our media has done since the cheerleading for the Iraq War.
jibeaux
Did I somehow miss the tea party’s laserlike focus on jobs and the economy?
Stooleo
So the teabaggers got conned. Think that’s going to change anything? Think that they’re going to wise up realized they got conned and then vote with the Dems? Hell no, these dipshits are tribalists first and racists second and punching hippies is just too fun.
Chris
Whoever thought otherwise?
Did anyone ever actually buy the notion of the Tea Party Movement being some sort of third party, or some sort of populist movement beyond petty partisan concerns? Did anyone believe that they were anything other than the Republican Party’s base with the Republican Party’s beliefs just doubling down on the Republicanness? Did anyone buy this bullshit notion of some Republican Party vs Tea Party dichotomy?
I’ve never met anyone, regardless of politics or voter information level, who actually believed any of that shit. They’re Republicans, period, end of story. Why the hell so many Very Serious People pretend otherwise when no one even remotely buys is (it’s not like Birtherism or even 9/11 Trutherism) is just beyond weird to me.
UofAZGrad
Won’t cutting taxes make women too ashamed to seek abortions? Or does lower marginal rates on wealthy taxpayers increase abstinence somehow?
Ash Can
The Tea Party is the Republican Sore Losers Club of America. As such, its issues and causes will reflect the gamut of Republican issues and causes. Anyone who doesn’t realize this is simply not paying any fucking attention to anything.
Yutsano
@Chris:
Because it fit Teh Narrative. And teh Narrative is ineffable and inalterable, holy be its name.
ruemara
You’re setting standards Villagers can’t live up to. Why do you hate pundits so?
@Yutsano:
Dammit, exactly what I’d wanted to say.
Mako
“Largely speaking, I have read acres of what purported to be Mrs. Eddy’s writings, in the past two months. I cannot know, but I am convinced, that the circumstantial evidence shows that her actual share in the work of composing and phrasing these things was so slight as to be inconsequential. Where she puts her literary foot down, her trail across her paid polisher’s page is as plain as the elephant’s in a Sunday-school procession. Her verbal output, when left undoctored by her clerks, is quite unmistakable.”
Foobar
Tejas is not alone. In Virginia, its been nothing but social issues. Gawd in skoolz, gay parent adoption issues, protecting marriage bills, guns in church, guns in saloons, re-defining construction/structural requirements for clinics that provide abortions, etc.. JOBS JOBS JOBS!
UncommonSense
Well, of course!
If they really were a new group of politically active conservatives, where had they been hiding all these decades?
I went to the first Tea Party rally on the steps of the state capitol in Baton Rouge in 2009 and I saw as many signs proclaiming America a Christian nation as I did the ones screaming “Don’t Tread on Me!”
They never were anything but the religious right in tri-corner hats.
kdaug
Sometimes I miss Ann Richards.
Other times I want to draw a pentagram on the floor and reanimate her.
But like was said last thread, backlashes tend to overshoot their mark. And when Texas goes blue, it goes really blue. From 1874 to 1979 there wasn’t a single Republican governor in the state.
Crashman
No one could have predicted…
Anoniminous
Need to run down, grab my bag of popcorn, and drag the schadenfreude sauce out of the ‘fridge.
You get what you vote for.
JCT
Yeah, yeah, poor Teabaggers got played by the people they elected. Maybe they should check out all those Teabagging House freshman who climbed right into bed with the lobbyists virtually the day they arrived in DC.
Dumbasses one and all.
MattF
To be sort-of-fair about this, the Texas Republican Party has always been the standard repository for OMFG policy initiatives, so it’s no surprise that the Texas Tea Party is too. Sampling from the same population and all that, etc.
jwest
We’ve all been waiting breathlessly for the first political article from this liberal sports writer, so it didn’t disappoint. The insights of someone who normally concentrates on cycling and tennis were the critical link missing in the Tea Party/Religious Right conspiracy.
Perhaps we can get a food writer to evaluate the Fed’s quantitative easing in order to put it in perspective.
Yutsano
@UncommonSense: See that’s not where things get REALLY funny around the teafolk. You really want high comedy, listen to them INSIST that they were out there protesting Dubya spending like a drunken sailor at Fleet Week because they were and you just didn’t see them cuz ur just a dumb hippie anyway and the Tea Party movement has nothing to do with one of THOSE in the White House and SHUT UP THAT’S WHY!! That portion of their raison d’etre cracks me up every. single. time.
@ruemara: Heh. Been the victim of slow typing meself. But as I’m off to work now the floor is yours. Have at it.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@Ash Can:
Sore Losers and Worse Winners.
As far as Tea Party supporters wising up to being grifted…feh. I’ll believe it when I see it. Seems like when they get mad, all that happens is their anger gets shunted back to the Hippies who somehow subverted their grand Free Market Utopia with their Godless Snarxism.
Yevgraf (fka Michael)
@amk:
Teabaggers of the pretend libertarian stripe always start fellating the religious right early in the game; they’re genetically predisposed to slurping sweet Talibornagain love splooge, and refuse to believe the liberal lie the Talibornagain are eager to propound their own religiousity with tax dollars and the organs of state coercion.
amk
@kdaug: wow. 39 to 6 for dems. How the fuck did dubya and goodhair even make it ?
robertdsc-iPhone 4
So what do we on the left do about it?
Anoniminous
@Anoniminous:
Oops
Wrong thread.
Studly Pantload, Vibrant Trollbot for Obama
Meanwhile, in Wisconsin,
risingshooting star Scott Walker is lamenting how hard gurbernating is what with all them citizens exercising their right of petition.No doubt he’ll quickly start threatening state layoffs unless the citizenry drops its recall campaigns.
RinaX
@efgoldman:
The Soshalist Kenyan was the main one going from city to city warning folks about what would happen, as well as spelling out to the congress critters that for better or worse, they couldn’t run from being, you know, Dems, so they may as well take the hard votes and have something to run on in the fall.
But you’re right, it seems like a lot of energy was spent in 2010 being angry about what we hadn’t gotten yet as opposed to actually acknowledging and promoting what we did get, and making people aware that even what was considered by some to be minimal progress would grind to a halt if the left as a whole couldn’t find some cohesiveness. That should have happened in January 2010, not September 2010 as the damage had already been done by angry narratives from both sides.
And as that dynamic has shown no signs of improving almost five months into 2011, I’ve simply accepted that I will have to battle lies from both the right and the left, in addition to working locally to do what I can. It’d be nice to only have to fight one side, but I can’t ignore what’s been obvious since June 2008 anymore. Not everyone who portends to be from the left or espouses the progressive line is interested in trying to get more Dems into office. I am. So at this point we’re just not on the same side, and I’m not going to pretend that we are.
MikeJ
@kdaug:
But the Dems at the time were the party of of the Confederacy. It’s just swapped around now, and the party of the confederacy still runs Texas.
kdaug
@amk:
Money. Oil and gas, specifically.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@amk: You have to remember that Democrat used to mean conservative that kept those negros in their place and fought for the south against those Damn Republicans. It was only in the 70s that that started to change.
A real comparison would be conservative versus less conservative. And that would pretty much everyone else vs. Anne Richards.
Chris
@UncommonSense:
The religious right was itself pretty much a sham, less interested in promoting religion than in providing a sweet family values packaging for unrepentant segregationists (the all-white “Christian Academies” that Jimmy Carter started taxing) and other elements too extreme for the GOP to be totally comfortable holding hands with in public.
The teabaggers are the same crowd switching their Biblical Literalist pretentions for Constitutional Originalist ones. In both cases, it’s the same shit underneath.
amk
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): Good point. Thanks.
The Moar You Know
@Stooleo: This. YOU CANNOT TEACH THESE PEOPLE ANYTHING. They are the irredemable 27%, the crew who will never, ever, ever, ever get it, the kid in the corner with the dunce cap on his head who grows up to be the town gas pumper, etc. The only thing that they can see is their skin color and the only thing they’ll ever be proud of is their own stupidity.
I don’t like teabagger-related posts on liberal blogs. While their stupid shenanigans provide hours of entertainment and schadenfruede, that’s all that they provide. They cannot be educated or reasoned with, and as Barney Frank said in a a quote that ought to be branded on the foreheads of anyone who is a Democratic voter, “Trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table… I have no interest in doing it.”
Next time you want to try to talk a teabagger around to your point of view, just talk to your table. It will yield better results, I promise.
Bulworth
So much media fail, so little time.
Chris
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Yes, but at the same time, “Republican” meant the Real American non-Southern WASPs who kept those uppity Catholic and Jewish urban immigrants in their place, presided over stunning displays of racism when fighting the Indians or supporting imperialism, and really didn’t care much for black people either.
While the Democrats of the time were conservative, it’s not precisely true to say the Republicans weren’t. In many ways (and not just economic), they were already the charming assholes we know and love today.
amk
@RinaX: Yup. The nutroots, being led by former rethugs and libertarians, have joined the teabaggers in hating that kenyan, muslin. hamsher’s ultimate orgasm.
Citizen Alan
@kdaug:
Um, for a big chunk of that period, opposition to Republicans in Texas (like everywhere else in the South) was driven by the fact that Lincoln freed the slaves. Kirk Fordice was elected the first Republican governor since Reconstruction in Mississippi back in 1991, because it took that long for the GOP to properly demonstrate its contrition for the War of Northern Aggression and assure Mississippians that it had stolen the mantle of “Most Racist Political Party in America.”
That said, with Texas, there are two possibilities: (1) a blue or at least contested state with an absurd number of electoral votes, or (2) an apartheid state where Latino voters are blocked from the polls by the same chicanery used for 70+ years against African-Americans.
Southern Beale
This is exactly what happened in Tennessee. After promising to focus on jobs all we got were guns, gays, a variety of wingnutty abortion bills (they’ve already done everything but out and out ban abortion here so now we have “you have to look at an ultrasound” bills and “every clinic has to post a sign saying it’s a crime to coerce a woman into having an abortion” etc. etc.) and also the “let’s pick on Muslims and Hispanics” bills.
It’s just so much fun to see the Republican controlled legislature claim they really ARE TOO focusing on jobs, it’s just the dar-blamed media that’s making them look bad!
The thing is, if Democrats ever take control back they will be charged with undoing this damage, at which point everyone will claim THEY are the ones focusing on cultural issues instead of jobs.
Heads we lose, tails they win. Lather, rinse and repeat.
gwangung
@RinaX:
Someone noted that incrementalism has worked quite well for the right. However, it does seem to be rejected by a lot of people on the left.
kdaug
@MikeJ:
I’ll give you the end of the 18th. But Pa Ferguson (1915) and (particularly) Ma Ferguson (1925) sure as shit weren’t Confederates – hell, Ma was a rabble-rousing suffragette.
Neither were any of the ones who came after.
Ain’t about the Confederacy down here – always had more Mexicans than blacks, anyway. (But unlike AZ, we kinda like ’em… good food.)
jwest
@robertdsc-iPhone 4:
“So what do we on the left do about it?”
I would suggest a strong response. How about an interpretive dance showing how sad the birds and trees are when small government advocates team with values voters to throw out liberals?
Southern Beale
John Cole:
Well, here’s the exception that proves the rule:
Dan
@Chris: Michael Steele as recently as last week went on Real Time with Bill Maher and insisted that the Tea Party consists of Republicans AND Democrats; people from across the political spectrum that are all just concerned with taxes.
So they are still pushing that BS.
Patrick
Lifelong Texan here who probably won’t end up a lifelong Texan thanks to the lack of value voters here place on education or any somewhat intellectual activity.
MikeJ nailed it: It wasn’t so much that Texas was Democratic for decades upon decades as it was that the Democratic Party in the South was the party of Confederate heritage in those days. Now it’s the Republicans, hence the same monolithic office holding.
The only thing that will break that monolith is the Latino factor. Up until now, the Texas Democratic Party has done something between jack and shit to reach out to Latino voters. Texas Republicans have, of course, never missed a beat to show their disdain for Latino voters in this state.
The problem here is a microcosm of the problem I see nationally that gets played out here in the comments two or three times a week: Relying solely on your opponent’s batshit insanity to do the job of motivating the voters you ought to be positively motivating is a losing plan. It looks like the TDP has finally figured this out and is starting to act like they actually want to win some elections for a change.
It’s not enough to scare people. You’ve got to give them a positive reason to vote for you to go with a negative reason not to vote for your crazy opponent.
The now-President and his folks knew that and nailed it perfectly in 2008 with hope and change.
RinaX
@gwangung:
Someone brought up the example of Roe vs Wade on another blog with regards to that STILL being an issue that’s driving the right 40+ years later, and which they used to really make gains at the local level.
LittlePig
@MikeJ: Exactly.
See Strategy, Southern.
LBJ knew whereof he spoke.
kdaug
@Citizen Alan:
It’s #1. Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and (duh) Austin were all blue in the last election.
There’s no Latino apartheid – they’re the most reliably conservative voters in the damn state.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Southern Beale:
There is a method to the Republican madness. The cultural and political structure of the US being what it is, over a long span of time neither party will dominate. Both parties are guaranteed about a 40% share of the electorate in any given election and the swing voters up for grabs in the middle have short attention spans; when things suck they will reach for the option of throwing out of power whichever party is currently incumbent regardless.
Which means that if in your short span of power before the voters get tired of your side, you can do more damage than the other side can undo when they get their turn, then you win. US politics is a random walk with land mines, which makes it not so random in terms of the results.
ruemara
@amk:
Wasn’t there a phone smear campaign trying to insinuate Anne Richards was a lesbian?
stuckinred
@kdaug: It’s that mackeral snapper shit.
The Ancient Randonneur (formerly known as The Grand Panjandrum)
Q: Greatest thing to ever come out of Texas?
A: I-40.
Thank you President Eisenhower!
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Chris: What you said and what I said aren’t contradictory, I was just focusing on why Democrats kept getting elected for so long. Your post at #42 is what I was trying to imply.
Jay in Oregon
@Studly Pantload, Vibrant Trollbot for Obama:
I about choked on my drink when I saw this:
“At some point if you have a recall after every vote, you could have those continuously, one-after-another-after-another and it makes it very hard in a Republic for things to get done.”
This is the guy who bragged in private to the fake Koch brother about trying to trick the state Dems back into the capitol so he could pass his union-busting bill. He can take his “makes it very hard in a Republic for things to get done” and shove it up his ass. He earned every ounce of the grief he’s getting.
gizmo
IMHO, the Tea Party was invented to make the rest of the Republicans look normal by comparison. They are all nut jobs, but having an even further right component helps build the myth that the garden variety batshit Republicans are centrists.
Litlebritdifrnt
There was a guy from the local “Tea Party Patriots” on my local RWNJ radio station last week. He was discussing “The Fair Tax”. My irony meter just about exploded when he said that he hadn’t filed or paid taxes since 1987. How is he “Taxed Enough Already?”
Chris
@gizmo:
I’d say it was mostly invented as a primarying army to deter any Republican politician from making any move towards the left (which was a real possibility after the clusterfuck of the Bush years). With the overall effect of making the Republican establishment look more centrist, so, what you said.
YoYosarian
@Dan: Yeah, thats why so many Dems ran as tbaggers during the mid-terms.
Ah, Mr Steele, name one Dem who ran as a bagger?
gex
The Tea Party showed you exactly how “third party” they are by how they conducted business. Did they run as a third party, having to get signatures to get on ballots? Hell no. They ran as Republicans. In our system, that means you are the same party. I’m sick of them getting to play it both ways.
ETA: By simply observing the facts of the party, you can conclude they aren’t separate. And the fact that Republicans didn’t complain about a different party being in their primaries is a nice clue as well.
Southern Beale
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Well, I disagree on the winning part. I wrote about something similar to this today, and I write it all off to cultural growing pains. We really did go through a major cultural revolution back in the 70s and even into the 80s, and then a technological revolution in the 90s — there’s just been too much change for people to absorb, and there’s been a lot of fear backlash. It hasn’t all shaken down, settled into place, some of our institutions (like religious ones) are still stuck in the past, there’s just a lot of uncertainty which for a lot of folks is a problem.
I think in 20 years it will all have settled down.
And the thing is, we’re right about all that stuff. We’re right about gay marriage and not demonizing Muslims and letting women choose what to do with their bodies and on and on. We’re on the right side here and no matter how many recidivist laws the conservatives pass while they’re in power and no matter how unable Democrats may be to undo it, it doesn’t matter because the culture will change regardless of what the lawbooks say. You know how many stupid old laws no one pays attention to anymore are on the books? Old sodomy laws and laws against unmarried couples cohabitating and whatnot?
We’ll win because while the battles may be waged in state houses and courthouses around the country, the war will be won in the culture at large.
Chris
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Indeed not. And your “conservative-vs-less-conservative” is probably the best way to describe the Republican/Democrat dynamic nationwide for a lot of history, as well.
Southern Beale
Um, I thought it was illegal to not file taxes. I hope he gets a visit from an IRS agent soon.
I know Tea Baggers who go on and on about the Fair Tax. They also call it a consumption tax. When I asked them to explain it the Tea Bagger I know couldn’t really do it but she said a consumption tax is NOT a sales tax. I asked, how so? She couldn’t answer it.
Anyway, one thing the Republicans love to do is tax everything but they call it a “fee.” Everything is a “fee” and in such a way we are nickle and dimed to death with little dings here and there, car taxes and cell phone taxes and internet taxes and every single thing in modern life, christ if they could charge a fee to breathe the air they would.
bemused
@Studly Pantload, Vibrant Trollbot for Obama:
It sure would be a lot easier if he was a dictator.
maus
@Dan:
Blue dogs still operate as Dems, so he’s correct.
Svensker
@Yevgraf (fka Michael):
That had me laughing.
Chris
@Southern Beale:
I don’t know why, but I’ve noticed this too – the FairTax is something an extraordinary amount of Republicans just absolutely love, though they can’t for the life of them explain it.
I suspect it’s seen as an all-purpose utopian solution. Essentially, “You know what a pain in the ass taxes are? We can make the pain go away.” “How?” “Easy! We’ve got this strategy book here that abolishes the tax code and creates a CONSERVATIVE tax code!” “Oh, wow! That’ll fix everything!” And because no one likes to do taxes and it’s a centerpiece of their bitching campaign, that’s two reasons to harp on it a lot.
srv
I would like to formally submit my vote that the vote on the Ryan plan was the Wingularity moment.
kdaug
@ruemara:
Yup, that was one of Rove’s gems.
kdaug
@stuckinred:
Long live the conquistadors.
Southern Beale
@Chris:
Yes and then we’ll all be nickle and dimed to death with conservative “fees” that are really taxes but shhhhh….
amk
@kdaug: That punk of turdblossom has been destroyer of many a people in his life time. Hope he wastes away.
Mnemosyne
@jwest:
Yes, you want a government so small that the IRS will have to ask me if I’ve had an abortion in the previous tax year.
But I guess that is pretty small since you want a government that will fit into my uterus to make sure I’m using it right.
Michael
RinaX, are you from a different reality or something? President Obama was adamant not only that Dems should never even mention Health Care Reform, but also that anyone who thought it didn’t go far enough was a Communist who hated America.
Incrementalism is fine. Obama rehired Bush’s highest economic officer. That’s not “movement.”
Will
“over room temperature,” centigrade
Fixed that for you
Tonal Crow
@Chris:
Not to me. It’s exactly the propaganda I expect.
Juicetard (FKA Liberty60)
OT, but paging Dennis G:
Less than half of GOP voters in Georgia, North Carolina, and Mississippi are glad that the North won the Civil War.
Jeebus…this doesnt bode well for our nation.
Marmot
@Chris:
That’s part of it, but they were mostly the same idiots who ganged up against liberals because that’s what they do. My own folks voted Republican reflexively and still do–they’re not racists in any conventional sense. But their hackles sure get up when they think a low-income mom is eating food from her own kid’s free school lunch, to use one example.
That the poor are mostly Latino in my old hometown is incidental. I’m convinced my folks would act that way anyway, because they have a crazy hatred and fear of spongers.
Yep, same people. They just looked around, said, “Oh, that group is anti-Dem? Sign me up.” They’ve got no real brains, no understanding of policy, and have never once asked to see the true federal budget.
jwest
@Southern Beale:
The Fair Tax is a sales tax on new, retail goods and services. It replaces all income taxes, social security taxes, business taxes and eliminates withholding taxes from employee paychecks. Every citizen would receive a “prebate” each month (average family of four $559) to insure anyone up to twice the poverty rate doesn’t pay any taxes.
Anything you would like to know about it, I would be happy to explain.
Chris
@Tonal Crow:
Whether it’s Birtherism, black-people-crashed-the-economy-ism, or all the way back to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the point of propaganda is that people believe it.
Clearly no one believes this, ever did, or was really ever supposed to (the TPM going Ross Perot instead of remining in the fold is the last thing its creators wanted), hence my puzzlement at the number of people who doggedly stick to the script.
kay
@Jay in Oregon:
This is still my favorite quote by a whining conservative on Wisconsin:
Ann Althouse, noted conservative legal scholar.
I laughed out loud when I read it. The drama! The fact that it’s ALL about her!
I hope she’s okay. “A vortex of political ugliness” outside her office window! Poor baby.
This was when she thought her candidate had lost, and she was accusing Wisconsin voters of voter fraud. She’s now dropped that accusation, because her candidate won.
Chris
@Marmot:
Right. But the nice thing about anti-liberalism is that it’s a catch-all for all kinds of disgruntled people. The GOP gets to unite all kinds of different and sometimes contradictory prejudices by focusing all the anger on liberals, the people who defend the hated groups in question. Class prejudice, religious prejudice, racial prejudice, etc can all come together and agree that they hate liberalism, because it’s what sticks up for the the hated groups in question whatever they are.
Which is how your folks, rabid racists, and various other people end up under the same tent.
gogol's wife
@Citizen_X:
Un-Bo-lievable!!!!
aimai
@jwest:
That will be the stupidest thing anyone writes on this subject until jwest writes on it again. Incredibly, the poor spend more than 500 some dollars on “stuff” to survive so the “prebate” won’t do them any good. Also incredibly we probably need a whole lot more money like things to run the actual government on. Also, also, why won’t the VAT you are proposing cover financial transactions? Why just stuff?
aimai
Tonal Crow
@Litlebritdifrnt:
You owe me a new keyboard and a latte.
drkrick
@YoYosarian:
Joe Manchin sounded close.
Marmot
@Chris: Agreed. Nice to see someone else say it, I guess. I get so tired of seeing liberals rail exclusively against racists, when that’s not all we’re up against.
What’s strange is how much guilt by association anti-liberals engage in. Last year I went to the goofball Tea Party-style anti-Tax Day protests here in Austin. I polled about 80 people with a long form I made, asking ’em what they thought the government was spending too much money on.
Most of it was the usual crap you expect from low-information illiterates–foreign aid, aid to the poor, etc. One standout was “environmental protection” — something like 80 percent of those activists said they’d cut way back. I can’t come up with a reason for their marked antipathy, other than that they associate environmental protection with liberals. None of ’em had budget figures to cite, or expensive “onerous burdens” to share, that’s for sure.
drkrick
@aimai:
I’m not remotely a fan of the Fair Tax, but wouldn’t the “prebate” be intended to cover the amount of the tax on some putative basket of monthly purchases by someone poor enough you don’t want them to be impacted by the tax as opposed to covering the pre-tax cost of the goods?
What rate would be necessary to make the tax revenue neutral?
jwest
@aimai:
The prebate is to pay for the taxes on the “stuff”, not the stuff itself.
What does the Fair Tax do that some liberals would like?
With the Fair Tax, wealthy individuals who derive most of their disposable income from dividends, tax-free municipal bonds, cash, or any other type of income taxed at low rates or not taxed at all would end up paying significantly more to the government than they do now. Every purchase they make of new goods or services would be taxed.
The Fair Tax would make the U.S. the most advantageous country in the world to base a business, especially manufacturing business that export.
Most lobbying by corporations would be eliminated for the simple reason that the primary reason for lobbying (tax breaks) wouldn’t exist.
Every citizen gets money from the government every month.
Only businesses that do retail sales would need to deal with the government transferring the taxes. Private individuals wouldn’t need to file any paperwork.
The “underground economy” ends up paying taxes which forms additional revenue to the government.
Tourists (the U.S. is the largest tourist destination of any country) would pay taxes to supply more to the government.
The Fair Tax would eliminate the immigration problem. On passage, conservatives would sponsor busses to bring in as many “guest workers” as wanted to come, for as long as they wished to stay.
drkrick
Really? The fair tax will address their concerns about terrorism, anchor babies and threats to our precious Anglo-American culture having to talk Spanish to get help in a 7-11? Truly miraculous, but I’ll need some help to understand how that will work.
Kirk Spencer
@aimai: Aimai, while I despise the so-called FAIRtax, your arguments are wrong.
Not 559 per month income, 559 per month tax. $6708 per year. That’s supposed to replace all federal taxes paid by the family of four making up to twice the federal poverty level.
For 2011 that’s up to $44,700.
Now, $6708 is 23% of 29,165, not 44,700. That’s a little less than 133% of the FPL for a family of four for 2011. (The 23% vs 30% mathematical trickery is far too well known for me to do more than mention it.)
Second, it’s not a VAT. The tax is only supposed to be applied to the final sale. A VAT is a tax on every transaction from raw good to final sale.
Now, one thing I always find telling about the use of this tax is that the house bill introduced every session states that investments aren’t taxed – neither purchase nor sale. Also, if your business provides something for your use it’s not taxed so long as it’s used at least partially for business. So have your business purchase your car, use it for business trips as well as regular use, and that takes care of that little tax. (jwest, that’s per the house bill, not Boortz’s book.)
This is, of course, all on top of the main problem with any all-sales tax process. Basically, people earning less than about 200% of the FPL tend to spend all their income, while those at higher incomes begin saving and investing. As a result the TOTAL proportion of income tax falls heaviest on those earning less — setting aside the “prebate” of the process.
Oh, one more piece of absurdism in the FAIRtax process is the elimination of the IRS. Well, except someone still has to collect the money and process the prebates and all the other things the IRS does. Boortz says that’ll be the responsibility of the states — but the federal government won’t pay the states to be the tax collection agent.
The end result of the FAIRtax is a cut in federal revenues and a further shift in burden from the rich to the middle class and to some extent the poor.
Tonal Crow
@Chris:
The point of propaganda is to persuade its targets to do something. Whether it does so by getting them to believe the things it states, or whether it does so through other means — such as by dumbing down the populace, by inciting hatred of those who know the score, or by moving the Overton Window — is beside the point. I’d put the teatards-aren’t-Republicans propaganda in the “dumbing down” and “moving the Overton Window” categories.
jwest
@Kirk Spencer:
As always, people misunderstand the Fair Tax.
You make the same argument as most Fair Tax detractors by saying “setting aside the “prebate” of the process”. Sure, if you eliminate one of the central aspects of any plan, it fails to work. It would be like saying the Social Security system is bad for old people, setting aside the payments they receive every month.
The Fair Tax does eliminate the IRS from the life of most Americans. Of course, there would still be an agency and mechanisms to collect the taxes from the businesses, and, if the states had a sufficient system in place for their sales taxes, it could be used. By reducing the number of tax paying entities to less than a million instead of over 110 million, enforcement will be easier.
Drkrick,
The line about immigration refers to the fact that most citizens would welcome non-citizens because their purchases would feed the federal coffers without being a burden on system.
Chris
@Tonal Crow:
In that case, I see your point. Probably true.
drkrick
@jwest:
OK, but that smacks of unicorns and rainbows to me. It would probably look like a plus to someone who doesn’t care too much about illegal immigration, but I happen to live in a town that’s attracted national attention because of local Minuteman activity, and I can’t imagine this would change the mind of a single one of them. Your overall argument would probably be stronger without that point – it reminds me of the obviously wrong answer on a multiple choice question.
[Edited to fix the blockquoting]
ericblair
@Kirk Spencer:
Yeah, this is the good bit. Considering we’re talking about around a 30% tax rate here (any number you hear below that is creative use of the denominator), tax avoidance will be huge. Everyone with minimal financial skills will start a sham business and charge everything to the business. Then the states can hire millions of new revenue agents to go transaction-by-transaction through everyone’s records to determine valid business expenses.
Of course, the lower skill level equivalent of this will be, like it ever was, doing cash business with no official records. The Federal Reserve will issue an amazing amount of new paper currency and sales of everything will strangely crater. Hell, in Canada the sales tax rate is around 15-16% and this happens with household renovations all the time.
And since the tax base will be considerably below the 100% of consumption that the proponents assume, the tax rate will have to go up, meaning tax avoidance will go up, creating a death spiral.
By the way, did they mention that new houses will be taxable? And the mortgage interest, too. And gas, on top of current taxes.
Yep, this is a real winner. I heartily approve of this being the second phase of Republican economic plan on top of screwing with Medicare.
jwest
http://www.fairtax.org/site/PageServer?pagename=about_faq_answers
Citizen_X
@kdaug:
Huh? Look again at that map you linked to. That line of blue counties along the southern edge of Texas? That’s the Valley. It’s 90+% hispanic. And, yes, they’re reliably…Democratic.
Uloborus
@jwest:
Except none of this is remotely realistic.
First, the very rich spend much less of their money on direct purchases than we do. Taxes like this tax them much less. On the other hand, poor people spend almost every cent on direct purchases. Your ‘Fair Tax’ hugely disproportionately shifts the burden of taxation towards the poor.
Oddly, it has been shown in the last three decades that tax cuts do not bring in businesses. Where they pay taxes and where they create jobs are not connected. And since many of the biggest companies are paying no tax here at all thanks to the current ludicrous deduction system, how is this going to help? In no sense that regular people care about is a fair tax going to improve the economy.
Tax breaks are a useful thing to lobby for. This is going to shock you, but they will lobby for other things – like the aforementioned reclassification of things they want as ‘not final purchases’. You are only rearranging that system.
I have no comment on the monthly payments part, neither to agree or disprove. I will move on to debunking the rest of your claims.
Only businesses filing tax forms is not a very big advantage. One might say infinitesimal. One might say ‘utterly unimportant’. The poor getting hit hardest by this system are the ones who gain damn near nothing from not having to file taxes, which is pretty easy to do unless you’re rich enough to have lots of deductions.
WHAT ‘underground economy’? It’s at least as easy for a company to avoid charging sales tax as recording payrolls. And I’m afraid any charge on sales is going to founder and sink in the face of the internet. They’re having a Hell of a time taxing that now.
The US gets lots of tourism because the country is friggin’ huge. You’re talking about depressing the tourism trade – and the direct contributions it makes to people in the economy – for a small increase in government income.
There is no immigration problem. Immigrants already contribute rather than taking away from the economy. The ‘immigration problem’, as I put it in quotes, is xenophobia. People who hate Mexicans are going to keep hating Mexicans even if they’re now paying taxes.
Your Fair Tax, like most libertarian ideas, is a cute sounding thing that isn’t actually useful in any way.
kdaug
@gizmo: @jwest:
JWhat?
HyperIon
@Kirk Spencer:
doesn’t sound fair to me. ;=)
handy
@jwest:
This reads like hucksterism of the highest order. I was just waiting for them to get into the part about how crystals can balance your chi and placing magnets over your temples will prevent nightmares.
Southern Beale
@jwest:
First we have to dismantle the unions, minimum wage laws, and child labor laws, then we have to weaken if not out and out destroy the Environmental Protection Agency and then we have to make sure our education system sucks so bad that the only jobs people are qualified to take are repetitive, mindless assembly line jobs,
Oh, wait. Mission accomplished!
Midnight Marauder
@maus:
Eh, not really. The numbers indicate that even the loathsome Blue Dogs still have some kind of awareness about things like human decency.
Also, I think it’s worth pointing out that of the 13 remaining Blue Dogs who survived the 2010 election, only three voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act [Reps. Dan Boren (OK), Mike Ross (AR), and Mike McIntyre (NC)] and a fourth balked at the Medicare cuts [Larry Kissell (NC).]
The Blue Dogs are horrid creatures, no doubt. But it’s important to make sure that the opposition is properly identified, especially if people believe they are on the same “team” as you.
Southern Beale
@jwest:
But that’s just ignorant. For one thing, why would Americans welcome immigrants coming in to take their jobs? For another thing, immigrants already make purchases which feed federal, state and local coffers, they pay sales taxes and gas taxes and all those hundreds of little taxes everyone pays on every transaction and cell phone plan and on and on. And finally, illegal immigrants contirbute millions of dollars to Social Security and Medicare coffers by using fake SS#s. The money is taken out of their paychecks but they will never collect the benefits.
Cain
@Kirk Spencer:
They should pass it.. I’d love to see these guys get all pissed off when they find out they are the only ones paying taxes and the rich is doing nothing. Even better when there is no jobs, no funds to help you get a job, or anything.. boy it’ll rock.
Me? I’ll be immigrating to Canada.
Kirk Spencer
@jwest:
Reading comprehension helps. I said no such thing.
I also said that where the bill (HR25) differs from the book, I’d use the bill. The FAQ is as useful for knowing what’s actually going into the law as, well, as the AARP’s list of recommendations for improving medicare.
Steve J.
This was obvious several years ago to anyone with an IQ over room temperature.
Well, my IQ used to be above room temperature but I was still surprised about how close the Baggers are to the Fundies.