Fear and Loathing of the Tea Party by Everyone: Republicans, Democrats, Liberals, Conservatives, CNN, MSNBC, Even Fox. Perhaps They're Crazy, But Then Again, Perhaps They're Just Speaking Truth To Power.

It looks to me like both Republicans and Democrats, liberals and establishment conservatives, are dreading the Tea Party's focus on the national debt and the out-of-control government spending. 

To be honest, most liberals/Democrats really don't think debt and deficits are a big issue at all.  It seems they just think that if the national debt gets too large, well, you just print whatever money you need and pay it off, or perhaps just go bankrupt and start over again.  Most of all, of course, liberals don't want cuts in any of the large entitlement/social welfare programs that have been put in place since the beginning of the 20th century.

Conservatives/Republicans, on the other hand, are constantly talking about small government, and they really love to cut taxes.  But when it comes to actually shrinking government and cutting spending, they are basically hypocrites.  Look at the following chart and you will see that (with the exception of the last two years of Great Recession), most of the prior national debt was run up during the years of the Reagan and Bush Administrations.  Yes, that's right, it's true.

And furthermore, conservatives/Republicans love big government when it comes to military spending.  When you combine military spending/wars, cutting taxes, and not cutting spending, what you get is a skyrocketing national debt.  And that is basically what they are promising us now.

With the exception of the Tea Party and its focused coterie of libertarians.  This new force in American politics is the first political group in a long time who want to seriously grapple with our fiscal situation. 

It was amusing (and also very annoying) to watch Elliot Spitzer interviewing Rand Paul on the Parker/Spitzer Show on CNN last evening.  If anyone seems serious about cutting the deficit and balancing the budget, with cuts to every area of government, it would be Rand Paul (which is why I supported him).  But liberals like Elliot Spitzer are very afraid of people like Randy Paul, because they seriously threaten most everything liberals stand for--big government, huge entitlement programs, social programs of all kinds, central national planning, and opposition to decentralization.  And so Spitzer played 'gotcha' with Paul, to no avail.  Rand Paul would have none of it, just as I expected, and he left Spitzer looking like a sputtering fool, in my opinion.

And establishment conservatives like Mitch McConnell are also afraid of Tea Party libertarians, which is why McConnell did his very best to defeat Rand Paul in the Republican primaries in Kentucky, to no avail.  So it will be particularly interesting to see the growing conflict between the Republican establishment and the newcomer Tea Partiers.  Oh, and I can't forget to mention how much neo-conservatives like Bill Kristol and the folks at the American Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation fear and loath the libertarians, because they threaten their beloved wars and huge imperialist military.  Very interesting. 

And finally, it will be very interesting to see where Fox News comes down on all of this.  The last couple of days, the Fox News anchors have looked a little bewildered.