When the Tea Party tones it down, it's still mistaken.

[alexpshenichkin]

This BBC profile of a handful of "Tea Partiers" manages to make them all sound fairly reasonable. Which is what makes it a useful look at why the movement is fundamentally misguided.

"I don't think it makes sense to spend our way out of recession. And the trillions we have spent haven't helped - unemployment is still high and small businesses are

Comments

[mumbly_joe]

You forgot to mention the thing where "small businesses" are most often defined by number of employees, and thus do usually include a number of "corporations" that exist mainly to minimize the tax burdens of one or a handful of individuals. Bristol Palin, for example, is a "small business owner", in all technicality. And, without getting into the issue of whether it's ethical or proper to game the tax code to minimize individual burdens (I'm somewhat sympathetic to either side of that argument), one thing that is safe to conclude is that the existence of these "small businesses" does not actually create value automatically.

Also, in fairness to guy #4, he's still very wrong, but I can kinda understand why he'd get things wrong: there are a handful of programs that impose mandates on the states, typically whilst also giving them funding to carry out those mandates. The most obvious examples would be Medicare and now the Affordable Health Care for America Act (what happened to legislation with pithy acronyms?! I WANT MY COUNTRY BACK!!), so I'd assume that this is either a direct reference to Medicare, or to the misunderstood version of "Obamacare" that floats around in these circles. He's still very wrong, because again, the federal government gives funds to the states that are contingent on carrying these things out, and states are technically free to opt out if, they hate money.

It's interesting to note that the couple of times the federal government did attempt to attach a fine or otherwise compel states to comply with a federal mandate (something about a toxic waste disposal program, IIRC) it was struck down by the Supreme Court on 10th-Amendment grounds- one of the few times the 10th Amendment has actually been invoked in the 20th century. That's why the federal government typically uses the purse-strings of federal funding to do this stuff, as they did way back with highway funding and the legal drinking age. Cooperative federalism, it fucking works.