And read them! Pay attention people!
Seceding from the Union has not gone so well in the past. When Texas first became a country of its own, it needed help from the US. Remember the Alamo! Remember it?? It was one of the battles of the failed attempts of Texas to be free from both the US and Mexico.
And then the South tried to secede... We called that the Civil War. It also did not go well for those trying to leave the Union.
Now, those both happened a long time ago. But the lessons are still pertinent when you are considering trying the same thing and expecting a different outcome. The US has the military and the budget for the military. Even the National Guard that the governors can call up is under the auspices of the federal military.
And, for those people who had the Tea Parties yesterday... How could you let yourselves be called Teabaggers? Really? Most people can't even take you seriously because you allowed yourselves to be called teabaggers! And again, you should have done some more reading about the Boston Tea Party first.
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I guess great minds think alike. :-)
ReplyDeleteI've had many discussions with the tax protesters, and have seen none call themselves "tea baggers". but I've seen many on the left deride the tax protesters as "tea baggers".
ReplyDeleteThe tax protesters were indeed inspired by the previous protest against bad government policies in Boston. But I wish they had forgotten reading about the fake Indian costumes. Those looked pretty bad.
Yeah, fake Indian costumers not so helpful, not that anyone truly believed Indians had done the damage before. Those original fake Indian costumes were really bad.
ReplyDeleteBut the original Boston Tea Party was not about bad government policies in Boston. It was about Taxation Without Representation. It was about the Tea Act of 1773 where tea was taxed 25% on top of the Townshend tax on tea. The colonists were being double taxed on what was then considered a staple item without any sort of representation in British Parliament. They also were not allowed to buy tea from other countries where they could get it cheaper without the tea tax.
First of all, the Obama administration has not raised taxes. Second, we all have representation. We may not like them, but we have them. And lastly, they called them Tea Baggers on Fox News. You can't possibly think that is a left leaning news agency!
One more point. The stimulus package and bailouts started with the Bush administration and continued with the Obama administration. Once again, if we look at history, we will see that during the Great Depression the thing that brought the economy back was not tax cuts but government spending. There were huge government spending programs through the 30s, 40s, and on in to the 50s that helped our ecomony recover. One of those huge spending programs was WWII. The economy continued to decline during the administration(s) that chose to only try tax cuts. It began to slowly turnaround when spending programs were put in place. The War was the big turnaround though.
Tax cuts alone will not save our economy. We need government spending to push start our economy so that people have jobs, start spending their money again, and then corporate America can jump on board too.
People need to stop arguing up and down political lines. They need to really look at history, the way it happened, not the way the pundits are spinning it. And we need to learn from it.
I haven't seen Fox News in ages, so I missed their reference to "Tea Baggers". But finally a use of the term beyond the left-wing detractors.
ReplyDelete"First of all, the Obama administration has not raised taxes"
They promise to, and intend to. For one thing, in the Senate, Obama was pushing for a tax on people making as little as $40,000 a year while saying he was only taxing the rich. This gives very good reason not to believe his current promises to tax only the rich. For another, he has promised to increase taxes on gasoline. This will hit everyone like it did last summer. And unlike what happened last summer, it would probably be endless.
"We need government spending to push start our economy so that people have jobs, start spending their money again, and then corporate America can jump on board too."
Government spending does not happen in a vacuum. The money should come from somewhere. Under George W. Bush, the national debt increased by a shocking amount. Obama's policies are looking to increase this debt at a rate twice as fast as under George W. Bush. There's a lot of waste in the spending bills he has signed. He made a good promise not to allow earmarks, and yet he signed a bill with 9,000 earmarks. A big deal is being made now about Pres. Obama trying to get departments to cut $100,000,000. Yet, he signed a bill with a deceptively-named provision for children's health care that actually sends billions of dollars for free government-paid health care for well-off adults. People who just don't need government handouts.
Also, the national debt, insignificant under FDR, actually held steady until WW2. If we cut Obama's budget by 2/3, we'd still have an incredible amount of "government spending".
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