Comments on: Only hard-working Americans need apply

By: CDN_Rebel

CDN_Rebel — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 15:35:12 +0000

I’m a little late to this one – but I think that most of the TPers are actually jilted. Scenario: they’ve kept a tight pocketbook, no debt, etc., and watched others get ahead or have more by being spendfree and carrying debt. TPers kept wagging a finger saying ‘you’ll get yours’ but when the day of reckoning came in Sep08 EVERYONE got a big smackdown. And that makes them mad. The TPers thought they were immunized by being debt-free, but alas they lost jobs too, then their HC coverage, then everything. So they have real anger and they want to make people pay, and the media that they watch/listen to offers up Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. When Obama came on the scene he really galvanized the anger, an anger that was already very alive and well. So the racism aspect is more a fringe benefit for the TP organizers than a genuine cause.

By: gimiento

gimiento — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 22:37:06 +0000

Come on commenters, talk about the research. Is “deservingness” (mediated through notions of race/ethnicity) a good way to understand the TP’s or not? My view is no. They rightly try to show the complexity of the relationship to “government” and entitlement, but its too simplistic to reduce the whole thing to another black/white type binary, and one so materialist at that. Like everyone else, they’re rushing to market with their tea party research, trying to capitalize, but depth of insight suffers. Reach deep, the truth is out there.

By: opaque

opaque — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 18:45:14 +0000

I thought Greenspan and his cronies tried the free market approach with little regulation already. And what we see today is the fruits of that labor. Has this editor forgotten the past 10 years?

By: Chieftain

Chieftain — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 00:49:21 +0000

Good article. This type of article is a direct assault on the values of our Liberal/Progressive/Socialist/Democrat/M arxist Elite. If they cannot define the ideology differences with those old arguments Class Warfare and Racism they can’t define it.

This study solves nothing. What it could do is allow a beginning open and fruitful discussion toward new policies for both sides of the political isle.

Amazing what facts do for any argument. I doubt the Obama regime will pay much attention to it. Sad.

Simply amazing.

“We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality” – Ayn Rand

By: threeRivers

threeRivers — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 23:21:32 +0000

Social Security is a government program only in that you are required to be in it. If collecting Social Security labels all of us as recipients of a big government program, then what do you call people who save at a bank which taxpayers have to bail out with ever more and more borrowed money and a bloated Federal Reserve?

By: kritik1

kritik1 — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 22:48:00 +0000

Not only the Tea Party so-called-supporters get soc secu, medicare, pensions, some of their family may be a unionized worker, and yet to keep up party appearances they have to defend the brazen conservative cause. Which means that they speak with a forked tongue, and there can’t be anything productive or progressive for the nation when citizens say one thing and do something else. They clamor they are progressives, are they?

By: Dede419

Dede419 — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 19:58:32 +0000

I am a social worker and it is very difficult for me to have respect for the Tea Party. The notion of the “deserving” versus the “undeserving” poor is utter rubbish and implies a certain moral authority. Until you have worked with families who are struggling under crushing financial circumstances and can assess their situation, it it impossible to use those terms. How would the Tea Party view an individual with persistent mental illness? Deserving or not???? How about a single parent with two small children??? The programs currently in place offer TEMPORARY help only in the form of TANF and, as most people know, TANF has a five year lifetime cap. By the way, it has been my experience that most of the poor are, in fact, working so perhaps some of the TP leaders could offer advice on how a person might pull themselves up by their proverbial bootstraps. The role of government is complicated enough without the TP folks clouding the issues with morality.

By: Laster

Laster — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 16:25:31 +0000

The simple mention of “Effective free markets”- whether a verbatim quote or journalistic liberty – left some lingering doubt that we would be treated to a truly encompassing view into the perspectives of Tea Partiers.
Theres some detachment in this world where those who live in relative financial comfort tend to marginalize issues that contrast their perspectives or affect their subsistence.

Effective free markets as a springboard, is as euphemistic as “The New Normal” is a dismissal of a much deeper financial crevasse. You only have to visit the adjacent articles by John Wasik or Robert Cyran to understand the disparity that exists.
Effective capital allocation, one of the hallmarks of the free market principle, and as an example, tends to take on some intangible meaning of it’s own when lavished upon executive coffers leaving workers scraping to justify every labor unit/hour and submitting receipts for every penny of expense.

Half of this country are blind to the effects of this and simply live from tennis shoe to cheeseburger. The other half is sucking the very life from them.

View from the petri dish – and Thank You Reuters.