Tag Archives: national debt

I’m crashing the tea party

By Tom B. Taker on | 4 Comments

I believe I'll have a spot of tea

I have decided to become a self-appointed “junior member” of the tea party movement.

Now don’t get me wrong. There are many areas where I differ with some of the movement’s main themes. But my understanding is that the movement is “grass roots” (in spite of some corporate sponsors), still doesn’t have an official leadership structure, and that localized parts of the movement are free to support their own priorities. Members are defining the terms of their own involvement in the movement.

I’m taking that same initiative. I am now a “tea party patriot.”

I should point out that I represent the citizens of the abyss, population one, where I now hold the position of tea party president. Unlike other elements of the national movement, however, I will not be doing things like starting a web site, selling merchandise for profit (buttons, tshirts and bumper stickers) and developing my own flag. The national flag of the United States works just fine for me, thank you.

I’ll begin by enumerating my concerns as I see them:

  • The federal government employs about two million people (not including the postal service.) Source.
  • The number of federal employees could grow to 2.15 million people in 2010. Source.
  • “Federal employees earn an average annual compensation of $106,871, including pay and benefits, compared to just $53,288 in the private sector.” Source.

Now the areas where I differ with the rest of the tea party movement:

  • I don’t think this is all about Obama.
  • I agree that dissent is patriotic, but I also believed it during the Bush administration.
  • The first TARP happened under Bush. (Yes, I know Obama also supported it.)
  • I don’t blame everything on liberals. 82% of our national debt was spent by Republicans. Source.

I have seen pictures of some of the hateful signs that have been displayed at tea party tax day protests. For my slogan, though, I wanted something edgier:

Let’s work together in good faith to make America the best it can be.

Now, when will someone show up to teach me the secret tea party handshake? 🙂

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China wants and don’t wants

By Tom B. Taker on | 4 Comments

The idea for this post came from two places.

First, some time back, I heard a news story about China wanting to develop their own company to build jumbo passenger jets. (Here’s one story I just dug up about this.) It seems they aren’t too keen on having to rely on buying Boeing aircraft made in the USA. For China it seems to be sort of a “control your own destiny” kind of thing.

Then I recently came across a story in Wired magazine that China wants to develop their own microchip company because, again, they don’t like relying on getting them from American companies. (Even though they aren’t made in the USA.) They especially don’t want military technology based on American computer chips.

Oh how very interesting! We’ll just go ahead and file both American computer chips and American-made passenger jets in China’s “do not want” column.

So, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, what goes in China’s “want” column?

First and foremost I think an argument can be made that China wants us to buy cheaply made plastic crap, like the Google Marble Maze pictured on the left, which I received for Christmas a few years back. They are willing to make that crap at wages less than most Americans would be willing to accept, so the crap can then be sold at prices Americans find palatable.

By the way, I don’t think you can buy this toy from Google anymore. China and Google are having a little tiff right now. But I’d bet my paycheck that Google still happily sells plenty of other useless items manufactured in China.

China also wants a middle class with more buying power so they can dump walking and bicycles and ride around in gasoline-powered internal combustion engine vehicles like Americans. They want western-style fast food. Believe it or not, Chinese people in their new cars have to be trained how the drive-thru works. We’ve been trained on them for decades. It’s new stuff to them.

Something else that China wants is the United States in their debt. According to Wikipedia, China is the largest creditor of the United States. Says Wikipedia, “In May 2009, the US owed China $772 billion. In total, lenders from Japan and China held 44% of the [United States] foreign-owned debt.”

Now I’m no economist, but it sounds to me like China has no problem with us owing them big time (no doubt our own fault for selling them things like our treasury securities and what not) and buying their cheaply made pieces of plastic crap, but at the same time they don’t want to be beholding to us for our computer chip technology and our passenger jet aircrafts. Is it just me or does that leave a bad taste in my mouth?

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