The Tea Party Exaggeration—an example of the irrationality of Conservative Voters
Yesterday ushered in a new set of Primary results that were, in many cases, scary (Nevada), and in some places, reassuring. However, the most confusing thing about yesterday wasn’t that a poor state like Nevada with huge income disparities supported a candidate for governor that is essentially anti-redistribution. This type of economic irrationality is common among conservative voters who somehow feel like less government intervention and redistribution of earnings will improve their lot. The most confusing thing to me this primary season is how much I keep reading about the ridiculous Tea Party in the news.
Let’s be honest: the Tea Party is ludicrous. After reading their missions statement (a whopping 34 lines of text), I am still unclear how they intend to lower taxes. Worse, I am unsure they understand precisely what happens with the tax dollars collected. The Federal Reserve doesn’t get huge shipments of cash in canvas sacks marked “TAX MONEY—PLEASE BURN.” Taxes go to fund government spending and social programs that are essential to the well-being of our country. Who do they think paid for the highways they used to follow their candidates around the nation? Who do they think funds all of the useless military contractor work in their states? Its like reading the notebook of an eighth grader taking civics for the first time, “we don’t think taxes are fair because… we don’t like paying them.”
A lot of convincing research has shown that government welfare programs are essentially costless to the public, especially education and preventative health care. This is because the increased productivity of those workers helps us all. (If interested, Peter Lindert’s Growing Public is a good book for starters.) The idea that people work less hard in the face of taxes wasn’t true when Ronald Reagan said it in the eighties, and is still not true. Give the supply-side logic a rest.
Finally, in what has become a longer rant than I intended, the Tea party only has 101277 members as of this morning. That is smaller than the margin of error in some state elections. Not only are they backwards, irrational, and preaching policies they do not fully understand, they are—or should be—inconsequential. Newspapers need to stop publishing stories about them, and let them fall into the mires of history.
