Mixed Feelings About the Tea Party

I like civil unrest. There's something good about knowing that people are dissenting from the majority. When people are all on one side (or seem that way) I start to get worried about my perception of things.

Still, I have to say that while I would like to see less government regulation and less government spending, I don't entirely see what the TEA Party protesters are getting at, and there's more than a little I dissent from.

Apart from the unbelievably stupid invocation of "Taxation without Representation," I cannot help but feel that these people are missing a central point.

It's not the increase in taxes that they should be talking about. I hear a lot of people using tax day as an opportunity to whine about the amount of money that the government is taking. That's not what worries me.

The money that the government is taking in taxes is too high for my taste. But what bothers me more is the money that government is spending, because the two numbers are not at all the same.

Conservativism should be about fiscal responsibility. It should be about holding the government accountable for its spending.

As much as I would like to abolish the income tax and the payroll tax and minimize social programs institutionalized by the government, what bothers me is when the government thinks that it can have disproportionate increases in spending and taxes.

We have an obligation to reduce debt, not to encourage debtor spending.

There are a lot of problems with the government regulation of TARP. There's a problem with the federal government investing the tax payers money at a serious loss (which is what they did). There's a bigger problem with the federal government creating debt to invest the tax payers money at a loss, without any accountability.

TARP has been seriously botched, and while some of that is the fault of the previous administration, some of the blame rests on the Obama administration, which has failed to institute regulations that it needs. I realize that they want cooperation from the banks and the auto industry, but that doesn't mean we have to put on the kid gloves.

So, lets talk about the debt. Let's talk about the mismanagement of taxpayer dollars. But let's not talk about the increase in taxes as if the government was responsible for destroying the real estate and banking industry. They're doing this wrong, and I agree with that, but taxes are not, at this point, a symbol of oppression, the debt clock is.