Tea Party

I'm not addressing the point behind legalizing drugs there's another pot-head debates on this forum.

that again shows you're a moron, considering I don't even do them, but legalizing them would solve a lot of problems with mexico, create jobs here, and provide tax income for government so yeah...

If it lends anything to the discussion, being in the country without paperwork is not a criminal offense.

Under Title 8, Section 1325 of the US code, being in the country without a visa or citizenship is a civil infraction. (Less than a speeding ticket.) Punishable by a small fine or 6 months of jail time if you can't otherwise pay. While they are arguably breaking a law, it's important to note that the laws on the US law books are not exactly stringent here. It isn't a criminal-level offense to be in the country illegally.

You may disagree (as do I) that the punishment should be more severe, but as the actual laws on this topic aren't exactly set in stone, and open to wildly varying degrees of interpretation, it should be noted that this topic is much more of a useful political football -- for both sides -- than quite as cut-and-dried as people like to claim it is.

so technically they aren't criminals? lol. But to the point, yeah it's dramatically blown out of proportion on both sides, hence why I was saying it's really not that big of a deal

On the subject of taxation:

It's true that by being illegal, they get to skirt a number of tax laws. Specifically, stuff stated on an IRS 1040: US income tax.

However, they do not get to skirt payroll tax. (Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, etc, which can be about 15% of income.) These taxes are withheld and matched by the employer, (see explanation above of employer being hassled for paperwork), and the employer still has to pay their matched taxes whether or not the person is illegal. This money still goes into the health care / social security general fund. However, being illegal, they are ineligible to receive benefits from these entitlements without proof of citizenship, so arguably they are contributing even more than US citizens in this one regard.

Similarly, whenever they buy anything in the country, they must pay sales and consumption taxes, just like a citizen. (Which can be ~8% of income.) There's no way around those.

So while it's true they manage to skirt some taxes (income tax in particular), their one-way contribution to the tax system in other ways, i.e. their inability to draw on certain entitlement programs, may or may not cancel it out in the end. It depends which study you read. But saying they "don't pay a dime" in taxes is political hyperbole.

what the Man said.

I was under the impression that what the Tea Party generally wanted was for taxes to get lowered, which, would fix the world.

I personally consider myself to side with the Tea Party more than not. What I understand the Tea Party to want, is for the government to stop giving themselves money, stop personal agendas, abolish all corruption (Chicago politics come to mind), and >get rid of useless spending and over spending<. Government builds roads, enforces laws, regulates things like food (which they haven't been doing in industries like the egg industry), and keeps national security in tip top shape (without invading our privacy) only. Government keeps it's nose out of our wallets. I suppose welfare and the like is necessary for those who actually need it and is necessary to some extent, but it gets abused so often.

So, the money cut off from all those unnecessary things goes back into the peoples income and then people spend it on businesses, the majority of which are not huge corporations but small family companies. Family companies expand, hire more people, who make more and spend more, fixing the economy. All that from getting rid of excess spending and over taxation.

Thats the goal I believe the Tea Party is trying to achieve. I honestly can't comprehend why everyone doesn't see the common sense there, but I guess that's why Obama was elected president.

Here's the problem though, Leon.

I could totally get behind what you're saying, but look at what the federal budget is actually spent on.

If you take your second paragraph, and set all those parts of the budget you consider "essential" aside, there's basically nothing left to cut. The Tea Party admits you can't cut Social Security or Medicare, because that's something people have already paid into, and you can't cut it out from under them. You can't cut defense spending or veteran's affairs. You can't cut the "those who actually need it" parts like unemployment insurance, which people have already paid into. You can't default on paying interest on the national debt. You can't cut roads (Department of Transportation), you can't cut law enforcement or anti-corruption (Department of Justice), you can't cut food safety (Department of Agriculture and Health and Human Services.)

So what do you cut?

The Tea Party loves to talk about cutting federal spending, but they are completely unable to say what they would cut.

They will say things like "cut foreign aid!" or "cut welfare!" But stuff like foreign aid is such a minuscule contribution to the federal budget it didn't even make it onto the graph, and the majority of that goes to countries they refuse to cut aid to anyway, like Israel.

So seriously, what do you do?

The truth is, there's bloat and corruption in all of these services. There's a metric ***ton of it in defense spending alone. (I mean seriously, we somehow "lost" $100 billion in Iraq foreign aid and nobody seems to care?) There's a bunch in all of those services, including health care and the justice department.

But that's not a very satisfying political slogan, is it? "Vote for us... 'cuz... uh, we're going to cut some spending! In some places! Here and there! ...really!" So instead, you've got this huge campaign of misinformation making people think enormous parts of the federal budget are spent on totally optional things, and all it takes is a magical light switch to shut them off and restore us to financial responsibility. If you guys just get angry enough, and vote for us again even though we screwed you last time... c'mon guys, just sign here.

And people wonder why they're always disappointed when the douchebags they vote into office fail to fix things the moment they're sworn in.

Obama got elected President because his opposition was an old guy and a crazy woman, and people were tired of the conservative agenda (lowering taxes, which doesn't fix everything)
also everything you stated as necessary, is the majority of the budget, the overwhelming majority so cutting back expenses that way is impossible.
The fact is taxes are the price you pay for society, advance society, and more taxes are needed, pretty simple.
The Tea Party has been leached onto the replicant agenda which is utter fail, and is filled with ignorant bigots who know nothing of the problems at hand, much less how to solve them.

"her der lower taxes ***" doesn't fix things, Bush lowered taxes, we see the problems caused by that, he left a trash pile of debt for Obama, and our debt in fact is now shrinking.

Your idea of small businesses is fine and all, however the conservative agenda isn't the way to make it easier for them, the only thing the conservative agenda feeds is BIG BUSINESS.
The liberal agenda is FAIL too, but their support based is at least filled with educated persons (which can't be said of the tea party or republicans) and in reality we need to work for a better humanity as a whole, and this squabbling back and forth isn't working, nor is the "take back our country" rhetoric spewed by the idiots in the tea party.

I had a teacher in high school who lectured on earmarks on bills. There was something like 3 billion dollars worth of earmarks numbering up to 32 different earmarks on some bill trying to get through at one point, (I don't remember which bill it was, but I believe it passed) and those spendings don't show up on reports for some reason or other (I think they counted towards that bill's spending?). Granted 3 billion isn't the biggest number seen when dealing with the federal budget, but it's those little things that save money over time.

There's definitely no immediate fix to the economy at the moment, and I believe it's generally accepted that if you leave any economy alone for long enough it'll fix itself within 8-20 years or something like that. What the country really doesn't need is more spending, like Obamacare. That's what shouldn't be happening, and what so many Americans that affiliate themselves with the Tea Party are so angry about.

The thing the spending crap was started by Bush, and quite frankly people wanted Obama to do more, then bitched because it didn't go fast enough, that's all this is. Many Americans affiliate themselves with it because quite frankly they're *** morons and don't know any better, they just want somebody to blame their problems on, if the economic policies set in place by Bush (ie: tax cuts) the deficit would have been 200billion lower on those alone (annually iirc), it takes awhile to fix 8 years of a blunder.

Here's the thing, though. People talk about Obamacare, right?

Obama took a public option (government runs all health care, abolish the private sector) off the table from Day 1. Didn't even include it in first round negotiations. Instead, they talked about government subsidizing private health care.

That was negotiated away, in favor of a private-run but public-backed system of health insurance, but no government oversight of how the money was spent.

That was negotiated away too. Instead we got co-ops, private-run insurance conglomerates who can negotiate their own rates (again, privately) with private citizens.

That was negotiated away too. It would cost too much and the Republicans wouldn't vote for it unless it was deficit neutral or better. So we got a law that "cost" $800B or whatever, but also shaved ~$300B from Medicare, (in line with proposals from John McCain 4 years earlier), got a bunch from a consumption tax on health care for the rich, tweeked negotiation rates for Medicare drugs etc, (also a Republican demand), and came out costing us $200B or so less over the next 10 years than doing nothing.

Of course like all things in government (shocker!) it's going to cost more than initial expectations. But it'll still cost us a ***ton less than doing nothing, and cover a lot more people.

And as it turns out? The bill we got is almost a carbon copy (all the way down to the "individual mandate" to buy your own insurance) that Newt Gingrich and the Republican Congress proposed as a counter-bill to Clinton's back in 1996. Literally. We got a bill that was written by Republicans. And yet now they're decrying it as "Obamacare" and saying it'll include "death panels."

Honestly, I'm not necessarily a fan of Obama, but what more could the man do?

as far as most people are concerned he leans way too center, but people put the goggles on and wham. Haters gonna hate.

edit: some people*

I'm not a fan of Bush, but he got quite a bit of problems that added to the deficit from the Clinton administration too. I'm not defending him his choices, but America's debt isn't his sole fault.

Interesting fact: The only time period that America was not in debt was it's "Golden Age" in the late 1800's, (1874? I believe) and lasted for like 11 months or something.

I agree with you Jaerik for the most part, and the biggest problem I have with Obamacare is that I know so little about it, and the fact that, to me, any new spending is bad spending.

thing here is
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x5529461

and I read something the other week about how Bush SR and JR increased the debt (about the same iirc) as much as Clinton lowered it, i forget where exactly I read that though, I'll have to look into it.

Also maybe you should get your facts straight before you go bashing something you don't know about, instead of following rhetoric. Fact is most tea party members are ignorant of the facts and are just angry for good reason but direct in the wrong direction and are angry at the wrong things.

Honestly, politics is like ESPN now. People pick sides and argue it for sport and entertainment.

Why do people root for their home team? It's not like they know or care about you. You root for them because they're familiar and/or are tangentially identifiable to you.

Well, it's not a lot of fun rooting for your home team when you know the quarterback is banging hookers on the side, taking gambling bets against his own franchise, and sending text messages of his penis to television personalities. (Amusing as they may be.)

So you rationalize away the downsides, and trivialize the improprieties while trumping up the good sides. You have a vested interest -- they've somehow come to represent you, so you feel obligated to side with them, even if you're kinda unclear what exactly you're siding with them about.

Take Reagan. Somehow, 30 years later, he's been resurrected as a mythical messiah figure who cut taxes and federal spending. Except he didn't cut taxes all that much. Bush cut them drastically more, and we're way under Reagan levels now. And look at federal spending rates ranked by year. Yes, you're seeing that correctly. The highest federal spending rates as a percent of GSP were all under Reagan. The difference? He spent it on things like national defense instead of welfare, which somehow makes it okay.

I'm picking on Republicans a lot here, but only because the thread is titled after them. (96% of the Tea Party have always voted Republican.) Everyone does this crap. You reinvent history because it makes you look good, and you downplay the times your home team has screwed you in favor of reliable, easy to understand, sweeping narratives of ideological glory which may not get anything done, but sure as hell make us all feel better getting to sleep at night.

quite frankly, Reagan was/is ***.

That's kinda what I mean, though. Can't we admit that both Reagan and FDR were great Presidents? Why has political discourse devolved into "Your guy sucks." "NO U?"

Can't we admit that sometimes, like the 80's, the way out of an economic nosedive is to cut taxes? And sometimes, like the 30's, it's to hike federal spending? I mean... really smart economists -- Nobel Laureates way smarter than any of us -- somehow manage to say both are true. Why can't we? Why does it have to be so Us vs. Them?

I'm arguing it's because both sides have so *** us over, there's nothing left to vote for. So instead, they're pulling the very last political card they have left: get you so pissed off with blatant misinformation, that you'll vote for anyone except "the other side." The more they convince us to listen to only one version of reality, by saying the other side is "biased" and thus should never be listened to, the more angry they can make us with complete impunity, and the more complete tools we all become.

your 2 party thing again, winner takes all.
basically what we should do is as a country force them to change elections themselves (including age I say, and put limitations in place to make it where people of all classes can run effectively) would be the only way to improve things, for the long term?
edit: also yeah a lot of Presidents suck, (hell I voted for a 3rd party in 2008, I'm not too fond of the liberal agenda) but I find that the right wing is the greater of the 2 evils (big business pocket, which have their hands in both...) so until we do something about this we're all ***.

I've noticed as of late it's always been a matter of voting for the lesser of two evils rather than a candidate that actually appeals to your interests as an American citizen.

Seems like your "stats" are pretty biased. I didn't come here to bash, just to say what I thought the Tea Party was about.

the tea party is about a bunch of angry people being led around like blindfolded dogs when you kick them yourself.
Also the only stats I used are fact, despite the fact they show something you don't like to see.

There was.

To be honest Idk about that, however even if there were you can't go and try to tell this kind of person the truth, they just don't see it.
Tea Baggers will be tea baggers.

My mistake, you didn't understand me. The stats you presented had a highly liberal undertone and were biased in one way or the other, making them harder to trust.

The main point of that post was to say that my main point was to present what I believe the Tea Party to stand for.

Statistics are hard. There's a reason there are entire majors for it in college.

Money is worth less every year. It's called inflation, and because it's compounded interest, it happens really fast. $10B in 1970 is $57 billion now. Similarly, GDP (gross domestic product, or the total contributions of everyone working in the entire country for a year) also grows in a compound fashion.

This allows politicians to do amazing things with numbers that let them make shocking statements, that nobody ever calls them on.

Let's say Obama were to hike taxes by $400B. Republicans would say it's the largest tax hike ever! (Well, okay, not adjusted for inflation. And not adjusted for GDP growth. Just in raw dollars. So it's incredibly misleading, but it doesn't matter. People go ZOMG! and rush to the polls to stop the evil commie ***.)

Or let's say Obama cuts taxes by $400B. He can turn around and say it was the largest middle class tax cut ever! (Well okay, again, only if you don't adjust for inflation, and ignore GDP declines for fiscal years A and B, and...)

I mean, it's really easy to find graphs that look like absolute apocalypse. Here's one!



The little asterisk they don't tell you about? That's in gross deficit. Not adjusted for inflation. Not as a percent of GDP. So you're damn right the graph looks like it goes crazy at the end -- the scale is completely bonkers. But nobody cares about math, or statistics, or selective interpretation. It provides a talking point, so we might as well go with it!

Here's another one from the other side!



Look, it's not bad! In fact, it's the Republican years that were bad. Those gosh-durned Democrat years were all sunshine and roses!*

(* If you defer payments on federal obligations, write them off to subsequent years, over-compensate for inflation and fudge the GDP percent growth.)

-------

The point is, saying a particular stat is "biased" is kind of the braindead answer. Of course they are. Mark Twain said there's three kinds of lies in the world: lies, damn lies, and statistics. You have to look at every problem from every statistic: liberal, conservative, and everything in between, and sort out the truth from where they overlap.

Or you could just declare your home team and listen exclusively to what they say, and knee-jerk reject anything else because it's "biased." I guess the latter is easier.

I'll try to stop being mean for a second and give you some advice, instead of living in fear of things because you don't understand them try to understand them and find a better way, it might be more troublesome but it's easier on the nerves.

Personally I wouldn't like the world created if the tea party/republicans (same thing really) have full control (again), on the other hand the world created by the far left (not Obama since he's very neutral) isn't too pleasing either, but it's bearable unlike the former. I'd prefer to see humanity and society evolve as a whole but a lot of things would have to change for that.