[wind_magic]

I would like to go to the local tea party, but I won't be able to. I am more interested in the Santelli event, I think that is going to happen in July but that is so far off I haven't looked to see what the details are. I am very interested in how all of this evolves, and I think that it will, there really are a lot of people out there who are not happy with the direction things have been moving in terms of tax burden for the past few decades. People were relatively willing to put up with the waste and non-sense when things were going really well, but now that people's budgets are getting tight I think people are obviously expecting the government to tighten its belt too, and that really is not happening, in fact it is quite the opposite.

I don't know why you (craigimass) attribute all of this to Republicans/conservatives, it doesn't have much to do with the Republican party, though I am sure they would like to think it does. Republicans have been just as bad as Democrats in terms of fiscal discipline, spending money on a war without raising taxes to pay for it, never cutting spending even if you elect them to do it, etc. The deficit has done nothing but go up for two decades, the national debt is as record levels, etc, and Republicans were in power much of the time. They try to blame it on a Democratic Congress, and Democrats try to blame it all on Republicans, but the truth is none of them want to cut spending or do the hard things, both parties want to increase spending for whatever they believe is important - to the detriment of the American tax payer. There is currently NO PARTY looking out for the American tax payer, the closest thing would probably be the Libertarians, but they don't exactly speak for the majority of U.S. tax payers.

I'm willing to listen to Democrats and Republicans on this issue, but I'm not naive enough to think that either one of those parties has my interests at heart. All they want to do is spend money, and lots of it.

Edit - Ronald Reagan famously said "I didn't leave the Democrat party, it left me", and that's how I feel about both of the major parties. I think supporters of both the Democratic party and the Republican party are really out of touch with what goes on in most households and in most people's lives. I think Democrats and Republicans are all running this country into the ground.