The Tea Party, far from being motivated by the righteous indignation of the men who dumped tea into Boston Harbor in pre-Revolutionary War days, is a perfect demonstration of what happens when a nation’s budgetary priorities are controlled by ideology rather than by economics.
The debacle that ensued when they refused to discuss revenue increases during the debt ceiling conflict while professing to be concerned about the deficit, and the concurrent refusal to allow the FAA’s funding to go forward, demonstrated where their priorities lie and how perverse and hypocritical they are.
In the debt ceiling talks, they held the credit rating of the United States hostage to their insistence on preserving the preferred tax advantages of hedge fund managers and oil companies, calling increases in their taxes “job killing.” How raising the tax rate of someone who earns a salary of billions of dollars a year to the same rate that teachers pay is job killing, only someone with a Tea Party mentality can figure out.
And forcing tens of thousands of airport workers into unemployment and costing the government hundreds of millions of dollars in lost tax revenue to make a political point about unionizing in this economy is nothing short of criminal.
