More Love for Local Tea Party Activism

Tea Partyers, there is a must read in today's WSJ about Tea Party activists setting their sights on local issues. We already had some local success in San Diego with the defeat of Propositions A and J, the half-cent sales tax increase and parcel tax increase, respectively. The article makes an important point about the need to grow bench strength of local school board members and other locally elected officials to give the Tea Party future leaders. It also points out that our influence can often be even greater at the local level. A few key quotes:

Tea-party groups in Pennsylvania, Delaware and Michigan have recently voiced plans to have members run for local town boards in 2011—a bid to start a farm team of politicians who can move up to higher offices. . . . Now, the Philadelphia Tea Party Patriots plan to launch the "Watchman Project," in which members will be assigned to attend local government meetings, monitor meeting minutes and then report back to the group, Mr. Reimer said. "If there is a particular vote coming up that we support or oppose, we would all show up to influence what is going on," he said.

Locally in San Diego, Dawn, Leslie and Sarah have been very active in keeping us appraised of political developments, but it will take more of us monitoring city council meetings, school board meetings to keep the politicians honest.

Photo courtesy of LeftCoastRebel.

No Election Night Blogging

It's going to take a while to digest the results of tonight's election. The overall results seem too close to predicted, so I am not sure what I can add. Further, there are reasons to believe that tonight's results is just round 2 in a 15 round heavyweight bout expected to go to the final bell, round 1 being the primaries that purged a number of elitist Republicans.

But what have we won? Certainly, we will bring the Obama agenda to a halt, but how much can be undone? There are signs that the Tea Party candidates may not have the stomach to deal with Medicare and Social Security, for example:

For starters, polls by the New York Times and Bloomberg have found that although a vast majority of Tea Party supporters favor smaller government, they don’t want cuts in their Medicare or Social Security. . .
Literally all of the others are equivocating if not completely backing off from their original plans to give at least partial ownership of Medicare and Social Security to individuals themselves—the only realistic way of limiting the government’s liabilities without completely screwing over future seniors or taxpayers or the economy.

The whole article has some flaws, but we need to take seriously the need to deal with entitlements in a way that is fair to both current retirees without totally screwing future generations. If we in the Tea Party don't find a way to deal with this issue, then the political class will reach for tax increases to solve these problems.

Fortunately, there are some easy things to do first. If the newly elected Republicans don't do the easy stuff now, then we need to hold their feet to the fire and threaten to give them the boot in 2012.

My previous nominations for the easy button:

• End all stimulus spending. Return all unspent funds to the Treasury.
• End all TARP spending. Return all unspent funds to the Treasury.
• Freeze the pay of federal workers, since the CPI stayed flat last year, so too should have federal pay, but it went up. (Full disclosure, I work for the federal government.)
  
• De-Fund all of the committees, czars and regulatory boards for Obamacare.
• De-fund the Department of Education, for starters, since it doesn't educate anyone.

Preparing to Govern

The Tea Party has already shaped the political agenda of the next Congress and achieved impressive victories. Some quotes from this weekend's The Economist:

Whether they have worked hard enough they will not know until votes are counted after next week’s mid-terms, but in one way their labours have already borne fruit. In primaries all over the country they have secured the election of Republican candidates who are “true” conservatives, not the big-spending counterfeit Republicans whom they blame for leading the party astray under George Bush.

The article goes on to compare the American Tea Party protests to those in France, and quite favorably to our side, I might add. But the article ends up asking some challenging questions that we need to be ready to answer.

Not French, not fabricated and not as flaky as their detractors aver: these are the positives. Another one: in how many other countries would a powerful populist movement demand less of government, rather than endlessly and expensively more? Much of what is exceptional about America is its ideology of small government, free enterprise and self reliance. If that is what the tea-party movement is for, more power to its elbow.

Can they be serious?

Ideology is one thing. But if the tea-partiers do well next week, especially if the Republicans capture the House, they need to move past ideology into the realm of practical policy. This means having something serious to say about how actually to bring spending under control.

The early agenda will be easy, as I have previously discussed. Ending stimulus, returning unused porkulus to the treasury and repealing Obamacare are the easy pieces of the work ahead. But this will only bring the deficits to the levels of the last years of the Bush administration, when Democrats controlled the Congress. What else is to be done?

I have some suggestions that I hope to roll out in subsequent posts. A quick synopsis of a couple ideas follow:

1. Tie the doctor fix to repealing a portion of Obamacare. If the Democrats want to renege on the budget estimates they used to pass Obamacare, they should have to pay the price for defunding the exact portion of Obamacare needed to fund doctors to appropriate compensation levels under Medicare.
2. Save social security. This doesn't sound very Tea Party, but I have a long term plan. We need to shrink the reliance on social security both in percentage terms as part of an individuals portfolio and by reducing the numbers who depend on it for their primary income.
   
3. Defund huge and useless portions of the budget that also funnel money to left wing causes. Start with the Department of Education.
   

More to follow.