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Tea Party: The Documentary

“There was a Korean War veteran who went to college on the GI Bill. He bought his house with an FHA loan. His kids were born in a VA hospital. He started a business with an SBA loan. He got water from the TVA and then from a project funded by the EPA. The man’s children participated in the school lunch program and went to college on government-guaranteed student loans. His parents’ farm got its electricity from the REA and had its soil tested by the USDA. His father’s life was saved by a drug developed by the NIH. The family was saved from financial ruin by Medicare. When the man’s house was damaged by floods, he drove on the interstate to an Amtrak station and took a train to Washington to apply for disaster relief. Then one day, he got angry about taxes and federal spending and wrote a letter to his congressman demanding that the government get off his back.” - Sen. Ernest "Fritz" Hollings

In 1975, Jimmy Carter promised the American people that he was going to reduce the size of the federal government, like he did the Georgia state government. Government grew. Ronald Reagan promised that he was going to reduce government to the point that it would be so small, that it could be drowned in a bathtub. Government grew faster than it ever did before or since. Bill Clinton put Vice-President Al Gore in charge of reinventing government. It grew. George W. Bush promised he was going to run government like a business. Problem was, he was a bad businessman. Government grew like kudzu. Even Barack Obama has promised that once this current economic crisis is over – one should not worry about the water bill when the house is on fire – he is going to balance the budget and reduce the size of government. No one believes him, but that is what he is promising.

Since Richard Nixon, our Presidents have experienced over forty years of failure in trying to slay the dragon of big government. Why? Because the American people love, and I mean candy hearts, flowers, poetry and notes, love big government… as long as it helps them and they do not have to pay for it. Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, independents, we love, love, love, love big government when it pats our bottoms with powder and helps us. The question is not big government or small government, but what kind of big government do we want and how are we going to pay for it. Politicians know this and they are not going to do anything to jeopardize their chances to stay in power. If big government retreated, even the non-insane tea partiers would strike at the politicians that they elected, like rattlesnakes.

How can I say that? Sit down with anyone who rages about big government and you will find that whatever success they are currently enjoying is due to being born, bathed, and burped, by big government. Remember Joe the Plumber? Whose name really was not Joe, and was not a plumber, who raged against big government… except the big government that helped his wife and him several times when they were unemployed. Go to a land grant college, where you pay nowhere near what a private university costs, or have a student loan? Thank you big government. Leaving the grocery store, look at your receipt. It is about half what it should be. It is called the Farm Bill. Thank you big government. Done fueling your car? You are paying for your gas about half what you should. Corporate welfare. Thank you, big government. Your elderly parents are not living with you? Before Social Security and Medicare, the elderly were the poorest segment of our society, now they are the richest. Thank you, big government. Tuck your children in, they are healthy and happy, and not being poisoned by tainted foods or toys that can hurt them. Thank you, big government. Big government saved my conservative brother’s life with its safety rules and regulations in regards to the automobile. My special needs nephew has had a better life, thanks to big government. Whether it is tainted pet food, the flooding of New Orleans due to poor condition of the levees, the BP disaster, or the current recession due to Wall Street, and the mortgage industry’s greed, how many billions did it cost the American taxpayer because government failed to do its job. Americans are like a friend of mine who was raised by two public school teachers, went to a land grant college, accepted unemployment insurance when he lost his first job, takes publically subsidized transportation to his job, and worked for several months for a Wall Street firm that was bailed out, and he rages about big government.

Am I saying that government is not wasteful and the budget cannot be balanced? No. There are programs and mistakes that the government makes that costs billions, but when examined in light of the overall budget, it is like the spare change on your dresser compared to your paycheck. Our Presidents failed in their goals because 5/6^th of the federal budget is off limits from any cuts. To balance the budget means making a lot of hard decisions and treating the American people like grownups. It means examining entitlements, maybe raising the retirement age, reducing the size of our military (which is larger than the rest of the world combined), means testing certain programs that the middle class now enjoys, legalizing and taxing the snot out of marijuana, paring down our industrial prison system, raising tariffs in certain industries to keep foreign competition at bay, and raising taxes. Acknowledging that certain social programs need to be increased, major industries that prey on people beaten back, and that the payoff might not be for a generation or two. We are going to have to spend money on infrastructure and prevention of further climate change, which is going to cost this nation trillions in floods, blizzards, and droughts. These are the tough decisions that get you kicked out of office.

I sympathize with certain elements of the tea party. I really do. Not the professional malcontents, who are the same people who wanted to kick Bill Clinton out of office from the first day of his Presidency, or the racists loons who think our President is a socialist, Muslim, Manchurian candidate from Kenya. (If you think Obama is a socialist, find a Canadian, or someone from England you know, people who really do have socialistic forms of government, and ask them what they think. Obama is a Chicago politician, not a socialist.) Sigmund Freud would have a lot to say about the modern white male conservative, his politics and his obsession with guns. Americans look around, see things are changing so fast, their country is changing, and they are scared. They want their children to have a better life than them, and it does not look like it is going to happen. They want to believe there was this magic time in our country’s past when honor and hard work mattered. They turn on the radio or the television and there are these demigods telling them that other people are the problem with this nation, liberals, freeloaders, and illegal immigrants and all that has to happen for those good times to return is for government to get out of the way and Christian values to return to the town square.

They want to believe that they did everything on their own and big government did not help them. The truth is, they are the babies of big government and would be lost without it. We can and will have to balance the budget someday. It is just going to be a lot of hard work and most of the tea partiers will not like it. A few months ago, I bumped into a relative of mine who was raging about how one out of five people now work for the government. (His facts were wrong, but hey, he watches Faux News so what do you expect. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics only 8 percent of Americans work for the government.) He sounded righteous until I realized that his wife and mother are school teachers, his nephew is in the army, his niece goes to a land grant college, his aunt works for another land grant institution, she was able to buy her house thanks to a government program, his grandmother worked for the DOT, and his grandfather was in law enforcement. Most of his family is employed by or works for companies that have contracts with the government. When I pointed this out, he quickly justified their jobs as needed. It is easy to rage about big government until you examine your own life and see its fingerprints on you. Tea partiers and conservatives entertain me because they notice the splinter in other people’s eyes but not the log in their own. Just something for you to think about as you’re driving down an Interstate, walking past a nodding police officer, into a public park to rage about the evils of big government.

Verdict: Strike out