Ezra Klein -- he still does not get the Tea Parties

In the Washington Post, Ezra Klein writes today that for all their talk, the Tea Parties are not serious about balancing the budget. His reason: they are not pushing for the massive tax increase that would result if the Bush Tax Cuts expire as scheduled. You would think that after a year and a half of Tea Party meetings and speeches, that Klein would understand their message. Either he does not, or he is intentionally trying to undermine them by misrepresenting what they stand for.

It's simple. The Tea Parties want a smaller, less expensive government that stays out of people's lives and obeys the constitution. To a congenital progressive like Klein, balancing the budget always means higher taxes. I doubt the idea of less spending never occurs to him (or if it does, it is in a dream that also involves Freddy Krueger.) The Tea Parties recognize that the very worst thing to do with bloated government is to feed it more money to spend. The tax and spend liberals that make up the Obamacrat majority would just spend it. They do not know how to cut spending. They cannot even deal with stopping waste. Remember that half trillion dollars of medicare waste and fraud that was going to pay for Obamacare? Do you know what Congress has done since that bill was passed to start avoiding that waste and fraud? Nothing! No surprise there.

If we end up with a Tea Party majority in Congress after the election, look for spending to be cut back to the level of 2006 or 2007. there will be screams of how the children are being hurt (funny isn't it that every cut always hurts children), but those same children seemed to have survived in 2006 and 2007, and they will also survive in 2011. The ones who will really take it on the chin are the thousands of government bureaucrats who toil daily thinking up ways to interfere with the lives of ordinary Americans. Just imagine if the Department of Education were reduced to one agency that just oversaw the making of block grants to states. No federal education policies. No federal oversight of school lunches. You get the picture. Each state would go back to being in control of its own schools.

My guess is that Klein and his ilk will be devastated if the Tea Party actually manages to cut their beloved federal bureaucracy. Still, after the devastation that these folks have wrought on the country, it is not too much to ask that they suffer through the demise of big sections of the federal government.