No, I don’t make a habit of watching, I was channel surfing, and heard them mention teabagging and Ron Paul so I waited to see what they’d say.

Something funny about the whole thing.

Anyhow, to the point, the economic critique of that approach is that households are less likely to spend the money immediately to consume goods and services. To be sure, some will to some extent, but not all of it. Furthermore, even if they wanted to spend all of it, they couldn’t — at least not immediately, or more accurately not as quickly.

This doesn’t even address second-order arguments about the merits of investment type spending such as infrastructure vs. buying more ipods. I’m not as convinced by that line of argument. It’s not readily apparent to me that infrastructure spending is necessarily better than other sorts other than the fact that one (presumabily) ends up with a useful public good in the end. That future utility may (or more likely, I think) may not arrive in time to help moderate the financial crisis — this is separate from the jobs created by the so-called shovel-ready projects.

In the short-term I think my biggest concern is of the type brought up by people like Simon Johnson. Essentially, if we don’t take steps to address the root cause of the current crisis then we may well find ourselves in this position again, indeed, we might not even find our way out of it anytime soon. The spectre of Japan’s lost decade is one example. He’s gone so far as to say that the problems the US is facing in the financial sector reminds him of many emerging markets that he has helped salvage.

Long-term, I’m with Rojas. I AM worried about sky-rocketing debt. I DON’T trust the Left to police itself notwithstanding Obama’s good intentions.

In a nutshell, one of the organizations, FreedomWorks, is more or less explicitly just honing in on the tea party action to try to soak up volunteers and money for the Republican party.

don’tGo, another organization, says of that:

dontGO founder Odom, on the other hand, does not see a parallel between his group and liberal ones like MoveOn. His vision for the movement is much more libertarian and revolutionary

“Their agenda was to get these individuals elected. Our agenda is to declare war on incumbency and long term power,” Odom told me.

Hence the rejection of Steele’s request. The goal is “not to promote Republicans at all,” Odom said. “I voted for Bob Barr.”

“I think April 15th is going to provide an environment in which a completely new movement comes out of that [conservative response to Obama's economic agenda]…new networks, new groups…the birth of a completely new base,” Odom said.

And the third, Americans for Prosperity, is more Club For Growthish, more specifically just an organization focused on opposing Barack Obama’s economic agenda.

Obviously, there’s an overlap between all that. And I still think it’s sort of grasping for straws to try to find any kind of superstructure here, because there just isn’t one.

Still, it makes me feel a little bit better about the whole thing. don’tGo strikes me as having the right idea, and I plan on finding out more about them. FreedomWorks is a large chunk of what I’m objecting to: just an attempt to coopt the Ron Paul movement and try to funnel it into generic support of Republicanism, though I find it hard to blame them for wanting to get onboard. And Americans for Prosperity is just another pro tax cut anti government spending organization, which there can never be too many of. Throw in the Campaign for Liberty, and that’s a constellation of organizations that I can broadly support.

As I’ve argued before, I think a reasonable case can be made that, if we allow that the federal government has any spending powers, putting through a stimulus push in the face of a potentially devastating recession is a defensible policy. I say “reasonable” and “defensible” on purpose, because I don’t like the underlying mindset, I don’t even necessarily agree with the policy itself, but it strikes me as both a sane response and a policy made, more or less, in good faith. I can really get behind people like Mark Sanford who are trying to make another good faith case that this is the wrong policy (indeed, you’ve persuaded me a lot on this point); what I can’t get behind are people who refuse to meet that debate whatsoever and view those who are reasonably bringing that case to the American public as prima facially insane and tyrannical.

But, my own experience colors that as well, as yours does with taxes. I’m probably as sensitive to the recession right now as anybody here, in terms of my personal life/economic situation. I have, in short, a lot to lose, immediately, by this recession continuing or getting significantly worse—I don’t mean a hit to my 401k, I mean, say, not being able to have a family, or begin a career, or eat. This isn’t an abstract ideological point with me.

Obama, right now, pledges to stimulate in the short term and reign in in the long term. I think he will, at least, fall far short on that latter point, but I also think he’s making that pledge in good faith, that he intends to, that it is theoretically possible to do, and that he’ll probably push to make good on his word, even if what he chooses to do will wind up (in all likelihood) being horribly deficient. If he fails to do so, that will be a perfect window of opportunity to strike back. But in the abstract, I hope he is able to make good on exactly what he is pledging to do. I don’t think it’s wise policy, but I hope he succeeds, I hope he’s right and I’m wrong and what’s possible falls more along his way of thinking than mine, and I don’t quite understand why somebody wouldn’t.

To that end, the Republican agenda right now, the oppositional agenda that the tea party is quickly becoming in service of—namely, accelerate tax cuts and freeze spending but only in the short term, strikes me as likely a worse prescription than Obama’s, given the economic context. If I thought that the tax protests weren’t mostly corporatism and focused on the higher end, and if I thought the short term spending freeze were in service of a much larger conversation on entitlement reform (which, right now, only Obama, ironically, is speaking to) and a significant parsing down of the government, and not just a peon to fiscal conservatism while being a simultaneous dodge of any of its heavy lifting, I could get behind that. But I don’t, if you can’t already tell.

So I can only judge these things on the face of them. And if given the choice between the Obama plan and the Republican plan-like thing, at this point I won’t sign off on either, but I have to say, at least Obama’s makes some kind of sense to me.

And that’s what creates the real problem for me, I guess, because I’m not especially anxious about my tax burden. I pay about 10% of my income in direct federal taxes, which is by no means unreasonable given the benefits of the society I live in. Hell, I could even pay more without having to really bite the bullet.

What I’m anxious about (more than anything else, anyway) is the absolutely obscene practice of spending tomorrow’s money today, and the long term accounts deficit. Obama has inflated this problem outrageously, and a good case can be made that he is, in fact, worse than Bush on the issue.

A cut in taxes now, without a SIGNIFICANTLY LARGER cut in spending or a meaningful reform in entitlement policy, would be a bad idea. As long as the emphasis of the protests is primarily about taxes rather than about the size of government, I can’t go along for the ride. It’s not that it’s not my favorite issue, it’s that I’m actually opposed to what seems to be the only core principle of the protests.