It's the Spending, Stupid!

Imagine my shock when Bill O'Reilly echoed a main theme of TLT on today's Talking Points Memo, laying into the unsustainable levels of spending at the federal, state and local levels. I normally find O'Reilly entertaining but not usually an inspiration for my blog, but he was spot on today. (Sorry for no link, Bill holds back his material from the web for a day, for business reasons, I suppose.) But this is the exact message of the Tea Party from day one, when we started by protesting the porkulus, the stimulus, and the bailouts. It's never been about race, it's the spending stupid. Why the left can't get this? Because it doesn't fit their narrative and it distracts people from the simple fact that excess spending is causing growing debts and deficits.

But, I think the word is getting out. More and more people identify with the Tea Party movement; the left's attempt at demonization has backfired. Every day we see more articles on the out of control spending, as O'Reilly called it. This is why we will be out in force on April 15. Now the liberals will say to the average tax payer, how has Obama increased your taxes? Answer: even if you don't see it on your tax bill Thursday we all know it's coming. Rich Lowry takes aim:

This is why the country has a roiling tax revolt prior to the imposition of any significant tax increases. The tea-party movement is an act of pre-emption, based on the simple calculation that higher spending eventually means higher taxes. For all the tsk-tsking about its supposed irresponsibility, the movement is attuned to the future in a way that the president -- who hopes to evade or hide the consequences of his budgetary choices for as long as possible -- is not.

Not only will be paying future taxes, we are already paying the price through increased inflation, higher interest, higher state taxes over mandated medicare spending, higher health insurance premiums and fewer jobs due to increased taxes on the rich and capital gains besides the tax increases for the grandkids. Just no increase in your personal income taxes... today. There, don't you feel better. What crap; the President thinks he can increase spending, while holding down middle class taxes and no one will notice? Memo for Team Barry, our level of economic ignorance does not match yours.

Time to get ready for Tea Party protests on Tax Day. The media is going to ask this very question of one of us at the protest, or some variation "Have your personal taxes gone up and if they haven't, why are you protesting?" Let's all be ready with our answer.

I couldn't resist one more paragraph of Rich Lowry's article to round this out:

"I like to pay taxes," Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said. "With them I buy civilization." With ours, we will buy a misbegotten stimulus program, bailouts, runaway entitlements, a costly new health-care program and a federal government where incontinence is a perpetual pre-existing condition. No matter what your tax bill this year, don't worry -- it'll go higher.