Comment on Tea Partiers and Racism

dude1394 wrote:

When dissent is racist it's time to ignore ALL accusations of racism. This is nothing more than an attempt to silence critics, it's disgusting to throw the race card every single time someone disagrees with you.
-------------------------

What are they protesting? What in the health care bill is bad? The reason Colbert King writes this piece is that the Tea Party group just aren't making sense if you take them at face value. They claim Obama is socializing health care when he's not. Health care is still directly provided by independent hospitals, and the means to pay for health care is still provided by independent insurance companies.

Tea Party protesters claim that they want to reduce the deficit, but that's exactly what this bill does. The money we spend now on health care is so inefficiently and wastefully spent that, if we do things smarter, we will all save money. And this is what the CBO has projected.

So, if it's not really about socialism and it's not really about the deficit, there are only a few things it can be about.

1 - The Tea Party protesters are uncompromisingly stupid, and don't know what socialism and the deficit are. They're simply confused or misled.

2 - The Tea Party group just doesn't like the tax increases on the wealthy that help to pay for this plan. This likely accounts for a large amount of the protesters, but it's an argument as old as taxes themselves - so why the vitriol now? In a government controlled by Democrats, expect higher taxes on the rich and greater benefits for the poor.

3 - Tea Partiers are motivated by some other impulse. This is the question King ponders in his editorial, and he finds striking resemblance between the current movement and those who protested civil rights. Is it coincidence that these similarities occur when we have a black president? Or when the issue in question similarly takes an exclusive right of the wealthy (health care) and gives it to the poor? I do think King is on to something here, and I can understand if you don't, but I don't think you can reasonably claim that he has no basis to think this way. He is, after all, operating under the assumption that there is some sense to the Tea Partiers.

The bottom line is that this bill is a capitalist bill through and through. It provides a social safety net which helps encourage people to seek better jobs and be more daring in the work place. It also decreases the burden on those of us who have insurance, so that we get a larger portion of our paycheck to spend in the free market each month. The second a Tea Party protester can argue those points without bringing up socialism or the deficit, I'm all ears.