Another Issue I Have with Tea Pots!

It just accord to me, so I gotta share it now before I forget. I'm sure someone has probably addressed this somewhere else, but another problem I have is that there's not policy behind the rhetoric.

They're concerned about government spending. Okay, what programs do you really wanna cut? I saw a few thousand or so amening Glenn Beck's assertion that in order to get the country back to where it's supposed to be, they may have to sacrifice their own social security and medicare benefits. Are they willing to do that?

A commenter named Teila made an interesting point in response to the open question post (not the page): government should only do for people what they can't do for themselves. So you know what? I'm going to list some of the things President Obama, but more generally and importantly progressives, want to see government do:

• protect consumers from being defrauded and exploited by banks and Wall St in general.
• protect employees from being exploited cheated out of earnings by employers and investors.
• make sure everyone pays their due share of taxes rather than use offshore accounts to avoid paying up.

You know, there've been comparisons made between taxes and slavery. Setting aside the racial callousness, what's more akin to working hard and not receiving the earnings you deserve or getting to spend what you've earned how you want is our current labor market. You may be okay with losing your job or losing benefits and earnings just so some cat on Wall St or in Aspen gains another .1% increase in his dividends. I'm not.

But I digress.

• make sure everyone has access to quality healthcare.
• ensure merit really does count. That what matters is what you know not who you know or what you look like.
• ensure everyone has the opportunity to come to know something!
• make sure there's a solid economy for future generations.
• make sure there's a solid planet for future generations. (Really people. We need to go green.)

I could go on, but here's the point: we want government to do for the citizenry what we can't do individually. Or better yet, we want government to do the things that're best done "in bulk" than individually. At this point, we're not where government is doing everything we wants and can therefore take everything we have, to quote Teila's quote of Gerald Ford. (I avoided being snide about this, but it has to be said. It's not as though Truman is known as one of the better presidents. As far as I'm away, he only finished Nixon's term and lost the following election. It's not even as though he's a stalwart of conservatism.) Right now, what we have is something more like the mob. We pay "protection money" and are "protected" (national security and all), but when it comes to anything else, we're more or less out on our own. Maybe that's fine for a lot of people. That's not cool with me. Sorry, accept that I'm really not.

But anyway, back to my original point: for all this brouhaha, how exactly do tea pots and kettles plan to get there? What's the policy behind the rhetoric?