that their candidates used to get them fired up enough to vote. The candidates would shout and yell about going to Washington and tearing it down and starting over. They were going to hit that town and show it WHAT FOR!! (what the hell does that even mean??)
Tea Partiers must be naive. Actually, think about it...mostly they are. Billionaires like the Kochs know what the deal is, but they made a mistake. They have used the Tea Party to try to finagle lower taxes and more money for them. In the process they convinced a bunch of middle Americans from the middle of America that they had a REAL agenda. That they were going to get things done! Honestly, they even lied to manufacture the whole Tea Party movement. We don't pay too much in tax in this country; hell, if anything we don't pay enough. It's a message that resonates with every day people who have every day bills and who aren't very informed, though. So now all these naive people who really thought that they had something going on other than insuring less taxes for the already uber wealthy are a little disenchanted.
You know the great part?? The manipulators of the Tea Party used the deficit as an indicator that we need to reduce the size of government. They were doing the 'smaller government = less taxes' math. Now the Tea Party is starting to realize that you can't reduce the deficit by cutting government spending alone. I just heard a representative of the Tea Party Express yesterday on NPR talking about how they realized that spending cuts along were not going to get the job done with the deficit. At this point they are talking about 'pro growth policies'. Their idea of pro-growth is to get rid of the current tax code, but my point is that they are starting to get the idea that you cannot simply cut to reduce the deficit, you have to increase revenue. Since sooner is better than later and you can't get the tax code thrown out over night (read: ever), I wonder if they might get a little more open to allowing those tax cuts for the wealthy to expire at some point? Since they keep saying it is all about the deficit, after all.
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