Why the Tea Party is Not a Viable Party

The Tea Party (or TPers from here on) is not a viable party and most of them don't even realize why. This is a real puzzle to me as it should be obvious to everyone.

To be a viable party that will get things done, they have to have a vision for what they want. Herein lies the problem. TPers don't stand FOR anything. The TP consists of a bunch of angry people. I can understand being angry. There is a lot to be angry about. But TPers are simply against what they see as things going wrong. They are against taxes, immigration, abortion, gay rights. They are not for anything. They have no vision, they only dislike what they see. You can't lead if you don't have anywhere to go.

A lot of the impetus for the TP was anger over the bank bailouts. Of course, it turned out that the bailouts wound up not costing very much at all. of the $700 Billion that was put aside for it, the government only wound up losing less than $30 Billion according to the latest announcents from the Congressional Budget Office. The reason for this is that when the banks found they had to be owned by the Federal Government and follow much stricter rules, they suddenly found they weren't so broke as they thought after all. Amazing how that worked. I admit I didn't like the bailouts either, but it seems I was wrong about their effect. What I don't like is that we wasted an opportunity to put in place meaningful regulatory controls, that the banks have for the most part gone back to their old practices. But this is not something the TPers are making noises about, which they should be.

TPers talk a lot about tax rates being too high. Of course, our tax rates are much lower now than they were in the past. So I would like to know how low is acceptable. Sadly, I have been told by some that paying any taxes is too much. This amount of greed and lack of any social conscience just sickens me. How is the government supposed to pay for the military that is so important, for the social security and medicare checks, for education, roads, and on and on and on. People don't seem to realize just how much they take from the Federal government, and yet they don't want to contribute.

TruthandPolitics has a nice chart showing the top tax brackets since 1913. Right now it is 35% for anything over $311,950. this is lower than almost any other time. Between 1988-92,the top tax bracket was slightly lower, but you have to go back to 1931 to find a lower rate otherwise. But from 1917-1925 it was higher than it is now. So for almost 100 years, there have only been 16 years with a lower maximal tax rate than now. And how much higher has it been? During WWII the maximal tax rate hit 94% because we were in a war and we needed it. Even though we have been at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, no one seems to want to pay for it. We keep getting tax cuts instead. In 1932, the tax rate jumped from 25% to 63% and went up from there. It didn't drop below 70% again until 1981. In all honesty,we don't pay nearly what we used to pay in taxes. It is no wonder that our government is running a deficit. I won't even get into the fact that corporate taxes have virtually vanished, while the slack has been picked up by the middle class. That is a whole other kettle of worms.

As far as immigration goes, theTPers are trying to cut their own throats. A passing familiarity with economics and how the country works indicates that poor immigrants are a sizable reason our economy thrives. The vast majority of jobs they take are jobs that Americans refuse to do for pay that is below minimum wage. If we paid people what they were supposed to get paid, if Americans took those jobs, our food prices would skyrocket. Orange juice would be a luxury. Unless people are willing to grow their own food, they should realize the US is using illegal immigrants as slave labor. This is widely known, and yet we turn our backs on the situation for cheap food.

Our country was founded on immigration. I would think a better alternative would be to make it easier for people to come in and get them to start paying taxes. But then we would have expensive food and we can't have that, can we? You can't have your oranges and your orange juice too. Choose. Humane treatment or cheap food?

Much ballyhoo has been made by the TPers about abortion being funded by Obamacare. This is a lie. Congress went to great lengths to ensure that no Federal money would go towards abortion. Yet the leaders of the TP seem to ignore that and intentionally spread lies.

The leaders of the TP know what they are saying is not right. But the TP is a party of anger and it is so easy to manipulate angry people. Anger clouds one's judgement and leaves one susceptible to manipulation. Decisions made in anger are almost always bad. People know this. but they are letting themselves be used. It is just sad that they can't see the cheats stealing from them. I mean, how clear does it have to be? Sarah Palin charges $100,000 for a speech. This amount is way out of line for speaking fees. If she truly believed what she was saying and she truly backed the TP movement, don't you think she would at the very least try to NOT bankrupt her constituents? The TP movement, outside of Palin's astounding speaking fees, is funded by primarily a few very wealthy individuals (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/opinion/29rich.html). They are doing this so they can take control of a large section of government. They don't care about the political and religious beliefs of the common person. They care about lining their pockets. But as the saying goes, there are none so blind as those who will not see.

A Solution to the Gay Marriage Problem

I had a conversation with a coworker today about whether or nor homosexuals should be allowed to get married. He did not think they should be allowed. I think that it is discriminatory to prevent  them. Because of the legal issues that have been created around marriage, it makes no sense to me that they are not allowed.

But then it struck me the obvious answer, at least to me, to fix the whole problem. I haven't heard anyone mention it yet and I am surprised it really just struck me today.

The problem to me is that marriage is an inherently social and religious contract. The main reason most people are against homosexuals getting married is that it conflicts with their own moral and religiouss code. Actually, to be honest, it doesn't really conflict with their religious code, but few people seem to really understand their own religious tenets, people just use their religion to promote their own personal beliefs and so they create religious tenets to support their own beliefs, but that is a digression.

Back to the point, is that our society has created legal arrangements based on these social contracts, and therin lies the problem. Because of the many legal ramifications of marriage, by barring homosexuals from getting married, we have created a second-class citizen that is being denied their rights simply onthe basis of who they love. Not only is this against American principles, but it goes against most people's religious beliefs unless one allows a certain amount of cognitive dissonance. But let's leave it with the fact that it is clearly discriminatory to homosexuals, despite the fact that it hurts no one.

The solution? I don't think government should be involved in marriage at all.We should return marriage into a strictly social and religious contract and remove all legal arrangements tied into marriage. Instead, we should only have civil unions for everyone. The government should only recognize civil unions, endowing them with all the legal arrangements given to marriages today.The sex of the individuals within the union should not be a concern.

Marriages could then be returned to a social contract. This way, if a church or social group does not choose to recognize such unions, they would be under no obligation to perform marriages for anyone they do not wish to. If a person chose to be married in a church, by a religious leader,they would be married in the eyes of that church and society in general. However, the government would recognize no difference between a civil union decreed by a Justice of the Peace and a marriage by a church.

This may sound like a simple game of semantics, but the entire issue is one of semantics caused by the confusion and intermixing of a social contract with legal issues. If we separate the two, then the problem does not exist.

Some people might say it is not so simple, there are legal issues involved. But that is exactly my point. We have created legal issues around the idea of marriage in which the government should not be involved.

For those that think homosexuals should not even be allowed civil unions, I have to ask what reason can you give other than homophobia? What they do has nothing to do with your religious or moral views, it does not hurt your marriage, it does not affect you in any way, so what right do you have to deny them the same rightsand privileges you enjoy?

This problem has been created through muddled thinking and hatred. It is time we put both aside.

The Arrogance of Unstudied Certainty

I was talking someone yesterday that told me that World War II was what got us out of the Great Depression and that that could work today, although he hoped we didn't go down that road. This man is very intelligent. He holds a doctorate and has extensive experience. But he has absolutely no training in either economics or history. So it seems rather presumptuous to me that he could make that claim so matter-of-factly. How does he know? There are lots of real economic historians that would disagree with him. Many have stated that without FDR's New Deal, not only would we have never gotten out of the Great Depression, but we may very well have lost the war because we would have been ill-prepared to fight such a protracted and extensive war. Other historians agree that it was the war that did it. Others say it was a combination of factors, of which the war and FDR' New Deal played a part. The point here is that the professionals don't agree. So on what basis does someone that has never actually studied the problem presume to claim they know the right answer?

I see this sort of thing all the time. Probably the biggest example of this is with evolution. There are millions of people that tell biologists and paleontologists that have spent their lives studying life on earth that they don't know what they are talking about, the evolution couldn't possibly work. It does not seem to matter to these people that they have no idea what they are talking about, they are certain they are right, even though they have not studied the problem even briefly, much less spent decades looking at the evidence. No, because their preacher told them evolution is wrong, it must be so. I find this particularly sad that these same people often don't even understand the basic tenets of their own religion (see this Pew survey), which is the biggest reason they claim to disagree with evolution. My opinion? If atheists on average know more about your religion than you do, you have no business judging something else based on your supposed religious beliefs because you are too ignorant of your own basis of opinion to make any statement with any credence whatsoever.

Another example of this are the true nutcases that refuse to accept that people have actually visited the moon. They disregard the evidence of the pictures, the word of the people that actually went there, the samples brought back. Nothing convinces them. They instead continue to promote ideas they claim disprove the moon landing, ideas in which a passing familiarity with physics completely discredits and the rest of the ideas are destroyed with either a stronger knowledge of physics or common sense. No, they would rather believe their conspiracy ideas, which don't hold up to any serious examination. Fox television even ran a show supporting such nonsense (http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2001/ast23feb_2/). It doesn't see to matter that lots of physicists have demonstrated that it was indeed possible, but done and that the reasons given to "disprove" it are all fallacious. Nope, they know better, despite not having ever taken a science class in their lives.

And let's not forget the Flat Earth Society (actually, I am pretty sure, at least I hope, this particular site is a parody, but it pretty accurately displays the mindset and arguments used by many flat earthers). Despite overwhelming evidence, they still believe the earth is flat. To believe this, you have to throw out pretty much all of known physics. You have to disbelieve in cell phones or satellites. You have to disbelieve any chance at weather forecasting. You have to have no reasonable explanation for tides. You have to believe every pilot in the world is lying, not to mention just ignoring the evidence of your own eyes every day. In short, the universe has to be run by magic with a lot of really odd quirks that give the illusion of a spherical earth. Still, they know better than people who have actually flown around the earth and all the physicists and scientists over 2000 years that have said the earth is round. The Greek Eratosthenes figured this out more than 200 years before Christ. But hey, millions of people the world over for millennia are obviously wrong according to these people. They, who apparently have never opened a physics book, know better.

Does this sound insulting to other people's beliefs? There comes a point in which the sheer combined arrogance and ignorance of people drives me to frenzy. Sorry, but I can't be polite about the utter gall of these people. When you have to disregard the evidence of your own eyes to hold on to your beliefs, when the cognitive dissonance builds to the point that it is impossible to have rational conversation, sorry, but I can't give that opinion even polite forbearance. If you are going to disagree with an idea, that's fine, but make sure you have some idea of what you are talking about before you pretend certainty.