populism 6

Brief internet research reveals that every state except Vermont (Oh that Vermont) requires a balanced budget. I believe it is through their constitutions. But of course, nobody plays faster and looser with fiscal responsibility than the gummint, so what constitutes a balanced budget can be pretty fluid.

I suppose the gummint is giving money to the poor because they don’t pay any taxes, but I think most of that money is not coming from the rich who notoriously dodge taxes, and even when they do pay, probably get more back than they put in, but that is all pretty general and I have already done my internet research for the day.

Ron Paul, I have to tell you I admired him a bit. He was the only guy who ever spoke any sense during the Mitt and the Seven Dwarfs debates of 2012. Of course he had nothing to lose since he was never going anywhere anyway. And I think we all admire a guy who speaks his mind and stands up for what he believes in, but what if we can’t stand what he believes in? I remember Ron Paul saying that he wanted to do away with all government food regulations, because if a company put out bad food that poisoned people, why people would stop buying their products and they would go out of business, so the problem would take care of itself.

Is there really a wing of the tea party that calls itself the Palinites, or is that what other people call them? She is a perfect example though for what I think of as the most brainless and thus most vocal part of the tea party. She mouths the general sentiments of anti Obamites, but she never has ideas of her own, or gets into anything specific. She walked away from her only chance to govern anything to join Fox where all she had to do was blovate, and then she couldn’t even hold on to that job. I don’t know why people continue to quote her fiery diatribes at conservative confabs, except they are in the habit of quoting her.

I expected Bachman to eclipse her, here was a sharper, more disciplined, prettier version, but she seems to have wandered off into oblivion.

Pure populists like Sarah can never become the establishment, because they are not at all interested in things like fixing potholes, they are not interested in governing at all. And if they do win elections, their backers will begin to accuse them of being the establishment and finding a newer less tarnished fire eater to replace them.

Hippies were a peculiar form of populism because we were mostly the children of the middle class, which is to say the establishment. I guess we can be credited with a general loosening of the uptight standards of the fifties, which the right wingers decry, but the lefties applaud. But I wonder if these things would have happened anyway, and if we were a symptom rather than a cause.