Dumbocracy

Yes, Duncan is right, it would be nice if our most preeminent source of news and opinion would allow us to ignore these idiots. But while The Times is going to bring national prominence to what is, basically, the muttings of a crank at closing time, at least they provide some insight into just how confused these people are.

SEATTLE — Keli Carender has a pierced nose, performs improv on weekends and lives here in a neighborhood with more Mexican grocers than coffeehouses. You might mistake her for the kind of young person whose vote powered President Obama to the White House. You probably would not think of her as a Tea Party type.

But leaders of the Tea Party movement credit her with being the first.

A year ago, frustrated that every time she called her senators to urge them to vote against the $787 billion stimulus bill their mailboxes were full, and tired of wearing out the ear of her Obama-voting fiancé, Ms. Carender decided to hold a protest against what she called the “porkulus.”

“I basically thought to myself: ‘I have two courses. I can give up, go home, crawl into bed and be really depressed and let it happen,’ ” she said this month while driving home from a protest at the State Capitol in Olympia. “Or I can do something different, and I can find a new avenue to have my voice get out.”

This weekend, as Tea Party members observe the anniversary of the first mass protests nationwide, Ms. Carender’s path to activism offers a lens into how the movement has grown, taking many people who were not politically active — it is not uncommon to meet Tea Party advocates who say they have never voted — and turning them into a force that is rattling both parties as they look toward the midterm elections in the fall.

Ms. Carender’s first rally drew only 120 people. A week later, she had 300, and six weeks later, 1,200 people gathered for a Tax Day Tea Party. Last month, she was among about 60 Tea Party leaders flown to Washington to be trained in election activism by FreedomWorks, the conservative advocacy organization led by Dick Armey, the former House Republican leader.

[...]

The daughter of Democrats who became disaffected in the Clinton years, Ms. Carender, 30, began paying attention to politics during the 2008 campaign, but none of the candidates appealed to her. She had studied math at Western Washington University before earning a teaching certificate at Oxford — she teaches basic math to adult learners — and began reading more on economics, particularly the writings of Thomas Sowell, the libertarian economist, and National Review.

Reading about the stimulus, she said, “it didn’t make any sense to me to be spending all this money when we don’t have it.”

“It seems more logical to me that we create an atmosphere where private industry can start to grow again and create jobs,” she said.

[...]

Ms. Carender is less certain when it comes to explaining, for instance, how to cut the deficit without cutting Medicaid and Medicare.

“Well,” she said, thinking for a long time and then sighing. “Let’s see. Some days I’m very Randian. I feel like there shouldn’t be any of those programs, that it should all be charitable organizations. Sometimes I think, well, maybe it really should be just state, and there should be no federal part in it at all. I bounce around in my solutions to the problem.”

Although it would be even more helpful if The Times added some context to the ravings of these fools and the con-men they follow.

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- The $800 billion federal stimulus bill has boosted employment by 1 million to 2.1 million and helped the economy grow about 1.5% to 3.5% larger than it would have without the stimulus, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday.

Those estimates are in line with the CBO's previous estimates, and those of other economists who've looked at the economic impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which was passed about one year ago.

There were few surprises in the CBO analysis, which was based largely on general equilibrium models of the economy that use economic theory and historical data to estimate how the economy would perform under different scenarios. Read the full report on the CBO website.

What's new in the latest CBO report is an attempt to push back at critics who have argued against the stimulus from a number of theoretical vantage points.

In a special appendix, the CBO answered those critics and justified its own approach.

[...]

The CBO replies: The theory that government spending will crowd out private spending is based on "unrealistic" assumptions. "This type of model generally assumes that people are fully rational and forward-looking, based their current decisions on a full lifetime plan." These models assume that people "have full access to credit markets" to maintain their desired level of lifetime consumption, even if they lose their job temporarily. These theories also assume that involuntary unemployment is impossible.

None of those assumptions are realistic. If the government were crowding out the private-sector, interest rates would rise to reflect less private investment in the future. Interest rates aren't rising, CBO said.

I know there is a small but emphatic group of people who think "the elites" are imposing some form of economic and political oppression on them, but it does tend to be helpful to understand the subject on which one is ranting.