Tea Party Movement Forgets That The Bush Administration Started The Bank And Auto Bailouts And Other History

Like many purely partisan and overly-simplistic political movements, The largely Republican lead Tea Party protests are attempting to rewrite recent history. It was only months ago that the Bush Administration had proposed the bailouts of banks and the auto industry as the American economy slipped into disaster after months of inaction by the Bush White House that only allowed so many banks to collapse and for the American auto industry to fall into near bankruptcy conditions. Only when the financial system and many banks teetered on complete financial collapse did the Bush Administration begin to consider action back around early September when the problems reached near critical mass.

In fact, it was on September 30, 2008 that the stock market fell by a record 777.68 points for a single day as many Republicans in congress opposed the financial industry bailout plan proposed by their own Bush White House and congress voted by a 228-205 margin to oppose the legislation.

And it was well before this entire financial mess developed, that the Bush Administration compounded the huge American financial loses resulting from the 9/11 attacks of 2001 and all of the huge resulting security spending with the huge mistake of the very costly new war in Iraq, leading to record deficit spending. For much of the Bush years, Republicans controlled the White House, senate, congress and the Supreme Court, each only rubberstamping the same economically disastrous record spending or legislation. It was only since 2006 and 2008 that the Democrats even began to retake portions of government back with two successive election wins.

But these largely partisan Republican Tea Party protesters don't want to hear a word of any of this recent history of their own creation. In their own imaginations, President Obama isn't just attempting to manage all of the serious problems he inherited from the previous Bush Administration and the Republican lack of economic direction of past sessions of congress and to bring these economic crisis issues they wrought for the nation under control. Like all simple minded persons, these Tea Party folks have no real working knowledge of economics for the most part and simply fail to grasp the complexity of issues hurting the financial and automobile sectors that years of Republican economic mismanagement created.

These tax protesters also fail to note that President Obama has long proposed a middle class tax cut to further spur spending and the economy, however it is congress that has failed to pass this proposal and pretty much tabled that proposal as they grapple with big shortfalls in revenue caused by this economic slowdown for business and so many workers now out of work now requiring unemployment benefits instead of being able to pay taxes to help lighten the tax burden for others and to keep the system well oiled and solvent.

And in the U.S. senate, six of the 10 largest earmark spenders continue to be Republicans, such as Thad Cochran. Many of these big earmark spenders come from mainly poor Southern states with very high poverty rates and low wages, and few labor unions due to "right to work" state labor laws suppressing earned per capita income. Democrats aren't even the worse of the earmark spenders in the senate.

Yet these tax revolt, Tea Party Republicans don't want to hear a word of this either. But the fact of the matter is that it was the Republican George Bush White House that allowed this whole economic mess to fester and develop into this current crisis instead of taking steps to prevent this serious recession despite global warnings for months from other nations with a great deal of investment or trade in the United States. Now, despite being the party whose White House had a large hand in creating this whole global economic crisis, many Republican leaders are trying to suddenly pass themselves off as being the solution to this crisis, when all that they have to offer is obstruction to the efforts of President Obama to resolve this crisis and get credit flowing again to spur home, auto and retail sales.

The Tea Party revolt is a wholly directionless political movement, with no real sense of recent history, and long on political hypocrisy, that seeks to offer the overly simplistic complaint of high taxes being the root of all evils. To say that this fails to grasp any decent understanding of the complexity of all of the serious economic issues currently at hand is to say the very least for the intellectual shortcomings of this new right wing movement.