What This Protest Is About

I thought it would be helpful to have a high-level understanding of what the Tea Party protest is about, and then the next post will be what it's not about. I'll be updating this list as I think of more things, and I invite suggestions.

The Tea Party Movement is primarily about fiscal issues at the Federal level. Of course, everyone who comes to a Tea Party demonstration is bringing their own political beliefs, and predilections. That's why this is non-partisan and open to people of any political stripe. As a general rule these are the kinds of things Tea Partiers are mad about, and the causes that bring us together:

1. Running up epic deficits and debt to buy wasteful pork projects.
2. Impoverishing our children's and grandchildren's future to pay for 'economic stimulus' today.
3. Spending billions to bail out companies that should be allowed to fail.
4. Rewarding lenders and borrowers who were irresponsible with tax money from the rest of us.
5. Punishing the most productive members of our society with confiscatory taxes meant to "redistribute the wealth" to people who didn't earn it.
6. Printing trillions of dollars, undermining the strength of our currency.
7. Undertaking an unprecedented socialization of the American economy - automobile manufacturing, health care, banking, insurance, and who knows what's next?
8. Doing all this under a President who's never run a lemonade stand, much less a country.
9. Expanding the unproductive public sector while crushing private enterprise.
10. Wasting vast sums of money on speculative 'green energy' while actively preventing domestic energy production.
11. Disregarding Constitutional limits on government power.
12. Relentlessly undermining individual rights, freedom and liberty.

These are the things we can agree on; the government is hopelessly out of control and run by incompetents who are simply out of their depth. Pretty speeches don't make up for policies meant to undermine the basic economic system of the United States.