The economic roots of the Tea Party

[jsmithsen]

Tea Parties identify themselves as savers. They have saved enough over the years to live comfortably on retirement if the rate of return was 7 or 8 percent. These relatively risk-free returns were "promised" to them by financial planning books and websites.

They are terrified as returns on cash are very low. In addition, the "markets" appear incredibly risky.

They are also terrified of future inflation and/or higher taxes.

In their view this set of events is due to the fact that "debtors" (who often live two houses down) are "winning" against "savers". They hate the notion of "bail-outs".

Of course this is very contradictory - interest rates are low because of the threat of deflation, not inflation. "Debtors" are being rejected by banks in 20 seconds.

And high risk free returns have never been possible.

We have had 30 years of economic conservatism (what Europeans call neo-liberalism). With this came "people's capitalism". Defined benefit pensions were eliminated and future retirees were left to their own devices. "People's capitalism" has turned out to be a "giant sucking machine" to take resources from the "savers" to Wall Street. What David Harvey calls "accumulation by dispossession". A huge factor in this was the notion of "risk free high returns" - this was the function of all of those CDOs, CDSs etc.

In any case 1 million or more in savings is still fairly good and people should be able to manage comfortably with the assistance of Social Security.

[CountAllVotes]

1. where do you get $1 million in savings?

And for that matter how can you save if you are not even getting 1% interest? Stupid. Plain stupid.

We had 30 years of shit is what we have had! Pure Reagun shit and the stink is still there. :puke: