Things that make me go hmm… Progressives and Tea Party separated at birth

If we can avoid the broad brush caricature of the Tea Party that the Tea Party wants a smaller government regardless of the consequences and the Progressives have never seen a large Federal or state spending program that they did not like, I can see some common ground between the two groups. Yesterday I got a copy of The Forgotten Man and it reminded me of the dual meaning of this title. For Progressives they feel their programs are protecting the forgotten man while the Tea Party folks think they are the forgotten man. Another area where they share common ground is their disgust in the performance of the President.

Coming to Grips with the Tea Party Movement

This week I completed the tax returns for my mother-in-law and our family. Due to a variety of maladies we are going to pay very little taxes for 2008. My mother-in-law’s tax return was severely impacted by the capital losses exceeding the capital gains. My return was impacted by closing down a failing business and being gainfully employed for part of the year. At the present tax rate and following the current tax laws I do not have a problem with my tax rate. I got off easy. In fact I do not have a problem with paying a higher amount in 2009 since I should have a lot more income.

What I do have a problem with is how we are going to pay for unnecessarily large deficit spending. Although Bruce Bartlett makes the case that an increase in the tax rates for the middle class would be well within historical norms, we are dealing with a deficit spending package several orders of magnitude outside of all previous norms. I guess if we follow his argument to its natural conclusion, we can pay for a budget deficit several orders larger any deficit in history by returning to the tax rates in the Clinton years. In an interesting faux pas Bruce Bartlett is making the argument that an increased tax on the middle class is justified and reasonable. So in just a few months we have gone from a tax plan based on increased taxes on the rich to a plan that will likely involve increased taxes on the middle class. I believe there is a really good reason why President Obama did not mention this option on the campaign trail. Considering the outlook for the economy and the stock market, I think the “rich” have a better than average chance of not paying as much taxes as they did during the Bush administration. That leaves either the Chinese or the middle class to pick up the bill. Given this scenario it is not surprising that at the grassroots level people are feeling both frustrated by size of the deficit spending and betrayed by the shell game antics with how the administration says it is going to pay for the deficit. If the stimulus package does not stimulate the economy or job growth, I would not be surprised if there are a lot more Tea Parties. There definitely going to be a lot more frustration!

"Wisconsin is in many ways a liberal state… but its electorate showed this week that it favors judicial restraint over activism."

Just after I had finished reading a FactCheck.org article called Winning Ugly in Wisconsin, I see this post on Ann Althouse’s blog. The premise of the FactCheck article is:

In Wisconsin’s Supreme Court race the winner was on the side that threw the most mud.

Ann points out  that John Fund at the Wall Street Journal highlights a different interpretation of the defeat of Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Louis Butler.

[T]he liberal majority on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court [has] made so many suspect calls [beginning] immediately after Justice Diane Sykes stepped down to join a federal appeals court. Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle replaced her with Mr. Butler, a former Milwaukee judge and public defender who had lost to Ms. Sykes by a 2-1 margin in a nonpartisan race in 2000. Justice Butler soon wrote the infamous decision in Thomas v. Mallet, which created a guilty-until-proven-innocent approach to product liability. Wisconsin became the only state to adopt a "collective liability" theory in lead paint cases: Whether a company actually produced the lead paint that harmed a claimant was irrelevant to its guilt or innocence….
… Louis Butler’s bid this year for a full 10-year term was bound to be contentious. Teacher unions, trial lawyers and Indian tribes (which had benefited from the court’s controversial expansion of casino gambling) poured money into third-party ads attacking [his opponent] Judge Gableman. They were matched by business groups such as Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, which ran ads noting that Justice Butler had earned the nickname "Loophole Louie" from fellow public defenders for winning reversals of his clients’ criminal convictions. Justice Butler made the mistake of embracing the nickname, claiming it was "affectionate." Voters weren’t amused.

Fund’s bottom line is in favor of judicial elections as "a check on the judiciary."

If judges are umpires [as Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts once said], the best way to ensure that they make the right calls is to bounce those who abuse their power from the game.

Politics is a necessary evil but this is far more than I ever wanted to know about Wisconsin politics and judiciary. What I found truly interesting was that the completely different views of John Fund and FactCheck on the same issue. FactCheck appears to have completely dismissed the complexity of Wisconsin politics in favor of a single issue, the effectiveness of attack politics. As a resident of Ohio I think I can feel Wisconsin’s pain.