While I think I could probably go to the Republican or Democratic websites and find a list of principles each, that's a fair point.
But if that's the case and we can't quite say what the Tea Party is, can anyone claim to know what the Tra Party isn't? There should be no call by folks like AlBell in this thread saying they know what the Tea Party is all about when no one seems to.
OK, I'll bite. I'll start by mentioning that I find it ironic that you complained about ad hominem attacks (that weren't really ad hominem attacks) pointing out actual ad hominems against the tea party crowd, and yes, the term teabaggers is itself a form of ad hominem.
No, what they really don't like is a black Democrat in power and poor people getting government assistance. That's what they believe in.
A bunch of jerks, that's what it is.
I doubt I can speak accurately for millions of Americans and sum up what they believe and what motivates them, but in my opinion, it all comes down to a few things.
1) Government spending.
Yes, Bush (or more accurately, the Republican controlled Congress) spent like a drunken sailor, and yes, there were
many people who complained about said spending, including blowhards like Limbaugh. There is an enormous difference in scale of the spending under Obama (and the Democratic controlled Congress). For instance, the deficit for 2007 (the last budget of Republican controlled Congress) was $158 billion. The deficit for fiscal year 2009 was
ten times that. Bush and the Republican controlled Congress were drunken sailors. Obama and the Democrat controlled Congress are sailors after a fifth of rum, a speedball, meth, ecstacy and a promise that "yes, you are my favorite customer, cutey pie..I really like you".
Here is a chart showing deficits as a percentage of GDP. You can argue about who is more of a drunken sailor, but the chart in that first link has been posted everywhere for a year and has had a large impact on people's opinions regarding spending. And when that increased spending (stimulus, TARP) was not actually spent on the things that were promised (infrastructure - remember all the talk about shovel ready?) and instead spent on political handouts and expansion of welfare programs, and
didn't help the economy at all, it raises some ire. I read people on this board (in particular) saying things like "what are they upset about...their taxes actually went down?", which displays either an unbelievable level of magical thinking or an incredible assumption of stupidity on the part of the American voter. Is the Sovereign Debt Fairy going to wave her magic wand? Eventually, sovereign debt must be repaid.
PERIOD. That means tax increases, and the way things are looking, it means very large tax burdens placed on our children and grandchildren, who (oh, by the way) also will not have the benefit of the entitlements like medicare and social security
that put them in such debt.
2) Centralised government.
One of the things many of the tea party supporters do not like is the way that Obama and the Democratic Congress have shown a top down, centralised way of doing things. This manifests in many ways, usually with Obama criticising a state for doing something he doesn't like (ex: the recent Arizona illegal immigration law). Or him calling the heads of an industry into his office and telling them "
My administration is the only thing between you and pitchforks" and essentially telling them what they will do with their companies. The stimulus package included, as a condition of the acceptance of funds, mandates for states to increase spending on certain welfare programs. Obama
stepped in and meddled with the GM bankruptcy to the benefit of his allies, when it should have been handled by a court without him applying pressure on behalf of favored groups for a result that completely ignored actual bankruptcy law. There are a bunch of little things whereby Obama basically wants to become the Micro-Manager in Chief of the entire country. There are many people who have serious philosphical reservations about that.
3) Personal Responsibility
Another major philosophical disagreement regards personal responsibility. To Obama and some Democrats, if someone does something unwise and is the cause of their own downfall, it is the job of the government to step in and help them out.
This says it better than I could:
The great underappreciated issue of this year’s election is the ongoing expectation of irresponsible people that they ought to be bailed out of their own mistakes by the responsible. It’s a bedrock concern that cuts clear across party and ideological lines. A recent ABC News story on the relatively strong state of home mortgages in Texas contained this fascinating note about the late-2000’s real estate bubble:
One of Alan Greenspan’s lesser-known contributions to the annals of the credit crisis was a pair of studies he co-authored for the Fed, sizing up exactly how much Americans borrowed against their home equity in the bubble and what it was they were spending their new found (phantom) wealth on. Greenspan estimated that four-fifths of the trifold increase in American households’ mortgage debt between 1990 and 2006 resulted from “discretionary extraction of home equity.” Only one-fifth resulted from the purchase of new homes. In 2005 alone, U.S. homeowners extracted a half-trillion-plus dollars from their real estate via home-equity loans and cash-out refinances. Some $263 billion of the proceeds went to consumer spending and to pay off other debts.
In other words, a great deal of the borrowing among people who weren’t all that creditworthy in the first place was not only based on bubble real estate valuations, but the money borrowed didn’t even go towards actually buying houses. It just evaporated into buying more stuff, with overvalued low-equity homes as the only collateral.
A person who’s borrowed only what they could afford to pay back looks at those numbers and says … well, they say things like this:
So lemme get this straight. You just HAD to have that McMansion with the granite countertops and the gold-plated toilets, so you bit on the 5-year ARM thinking oh, sure, you’ll be in upper management by then and making down payments on your summer home in Martha’s Vineyard, and this 6000-square-footer will be small potatoes. In the meantime, I get the split-level built in 1989 with the peeling popcorn ceiling at a fixed rate I know I can afford even if things go south for a while. You get canned, your rate balloons, and suddenly YOU’RE supposed to get help. YOU get six months without having to pay at all, AND get to refinance at a sweetheart rate while you look for another suit job. Where’s mine, Ace? If somebody really got swindled, well then okay, let’s figure something out. I can see a tweak here and a tweak there. But what’s the reward for being responsible? I haven’t found the bank or utility that takes righteousness for payment.
That’s no slavering right-wing tea partier talking; that’s my friend Lein Shory, who among other things is an Obama voter and confirmed liberal.
Obama has bent over backwards to absolve people with underwater mortgages from their responsibility to fulfill their side of the contract by forcing banks to forgive portions of principle. Obama has even declared a moratorium on foreclosures (with no statutory authority to do so). Which leads to...
4) Fundamentally changing the relationship between government and citizens
The way things are supposed to work is that government sets bound on behavior. There is a line; step past the line and you have committed a crime. Anything outside that line is against the law and will be punished by government.
Everything inside the line is acceptable and the only time government
compels behavior is when someone crosses that line. Obama is blurring that line by using the power of government to pressure specific groups and individuals to do what he wants. A good example is the "pitchfork" link above:
Arrayed around a long mahogany table in the White House state dining room last week, the CEOs of the most powerful financial institutions in the world offered several explanations for paying high salaries to their employees — and, by extension, to themselves.
“These are complicated companies,” one CEO said. Offered another: “We’re competing for talent on an international market.”
But President Barack Obama wasn’t in a mood to hear them out. He stopped the conversation and offered a blunt reminder of the public’s reaction to such explanations. “Be careful how you make those statements, gentlemen. The public isn’t buying that.”
“My administration,” the president added, “is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”
...
According to the accounts of sources inside the room, President Obama told the CEOs exactly what he expects from them, and pushed back forcefully when they attempted to defend Wall Street’s legendarily high-paying ways
He has no statutory authority to dictate how these companies run their business. This is not "you've stepped outside the bounds of the law", this is "you aren't doing what I
want you to do". There have been many other (mostly smaller) cases of this sort of thing, including threats to the insurance companies if they withheld support for the healthcare bill.
There are other issues, as well, including hostility to the free market and an avowed desire to dramatically increase wealth redistribution.
