Teabagging Tax Day (Political? Sexual?)

[3113]

So, Fox News is trying to make April 15th a big day for protesting...um....well, it's a little hard to say. They seem to be protesting TARP and other bailouts that happened under Bush, also the Obama bailout, even though that gives a lot of people tax breaks...or maybe they're trying to protest the increase in taxes on the rich of something like 3% that will be happening 2 years from now. Anyway, as you may have heard they've decided to protest taxes in general with "teabagging parties" harkening back (they say) to the Boston Tea Party.

Yes, that is what they're calling it: "Teabagging." American History would have been so much more interesting back in jr. High if I'd only known what those Bostonians dressed up like Indians had really been doing on that boat. All this time I thought they were dumping tea....(hmmm. Plot bunny?)

The idea of these teabagging parties is that the protesters will buy bags of tea and pour their contents into some body of water. Never mind that the original anti-tea-tax rebels didn't buy that tea--they were vandals who boarded the ship and dumped it, depriving the tea company of its profits and the crown of its taxes. In this instance, the "rebels" seem to be making the tea company plenty of money, and aren't depriving the government of any money if they did, indeed, do their taxes. But who am I to quibble with symbolism? Not to mention stimulating the economy by buying lots of tea. So. Go rebels!

What I'm thinking is, wouldn't it be more fun to have a real "teabagging" party? If we must protest having to pay taxes, shouldn't we, here on this erotica forum, do it in the most traditional way? Would certain gentlemen here be willing to offer up their teabags for an erotic protest? Would others (of either sex) be willing to "teabag" them in the American spirit of rebellion? I'm not sure what we'd prove, but it'd be a lot more fun than dumping spoonfuls of Lipton's into the bathtub. And it'd probably make a bigger splash.

 

[sr71plt]

Couldn't wait to get my taxes filed. Got a whole bunch of money back.

 

[voluptuary_manque]

And when Fox News finds out what teabagging means, how will they react?

 

[Huckleman2000]

This is hilarious!
How many times can Rachel Maddow say 'teabag'?

 

[3113]

And when Fox News finds out what teabagging means, how will they react?

If someone hasn't let them in on it yet, they've surely seen other news commentators obliquely pointing it out to them. John Stewart and Maddow certainly have.

It is, shall we say, an unfortunate choice of term...or not depending on how you want to look at it. But that's my point. We all know what it means, so our party's bound to be more fun!

 

[Huckleman2000]

ROFL, MSNBC is having a field day with this. Countdown just did a story about how Fox News is promoting these Teabagging Parties, and how they're actually being financed and promoted by the same corporate lobby as ever, including former Sen. Dick Armey's astroturf organization.
"If these teabagging parties actually take off, they're going to need a Dick... Armey."

 

[DeeZire]

Here's another video link from Huff, with an earnest young man explaining the ramifications of the mix up. Near the end he suggests that the next conservative campaign is going to be commemorating a patriot from the history books, John Fingerbanger.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/09/teabag-party-mix-up-video_n_185058.html

 

[DesertPirate]

Lets, it's actually TEA parties in the sprit of our ancestors.
The meaning is easy.
Taxed
Enough
Already

It is to protest the tax increases coming. Like the fact that most electric bills will increase 50% if crap and trap, oops, cap and trade, goes through. Hope you can afford that, I can't.
Fox didn't start it they are just the only network covering it.
The alternative is to send a tea bag to each of your Senators, one to your Representative, and one to Obama.

 

[sr71plt]

It is to protest the tax increases coming.

I'll wait to protest onerous things that actually happen myself. Sounds like a Sore Losers Club field trip.

 

[Huckleman2000]

[...]
Fox didn't start it they are just the only network covering it.

Fox isn't "covering" it, they're promoting it, complete with personalities in attendance at some of the "protests".

The alternative is to send a tea bag to each of your Senators, one to your Representative, and one to Obama.

Yes, that's the 'teabagging' - What a good little corporate tool you are! You know all about what you're supposed to do.

 

[DesertPirate]

Here is where it comes from.

http://taxdayteaparty.com/

 

[DesertPirate]

Fox isn't "covering" it, they're promoting it, complete with personalities in attendance at some of the "protests".

Yes, that's the 'teabagging' - What a good little corporate tool you are! You know all about what you're supposed to do.

It's either that or throw them in jail for fraudulent spending of our money. It has never been theirs, it's always been ours. This is just a nice reminder. There will be more if needed. Those clowns make drunken sailors look like they have good judgement.

 

[sr71plt]

It's either that or throw them in jail for fraudulent spending of our money. It has never been theirs, it's always been ours. This is just a nice reminder. There will be more if needed. Those clowns make drunken sailors look like they have good judgement.

I'm all for sending your share of it back to you and letting you worry about contracting out all of the services covered individually. Bet that would shut you up real fast about value for your money.

I'd like to be there the day you walked to the end of your driveway and discovered that if you wanted a road there, you needed to get on the telephone and write someone a check.

 

[DeeZire]

It's either that or throw them in jail for fraudulent spending of our money. It has never been theirs, it's always been ours. This is just a nice reminder. There will be more if needed. Those clowns make drunken sailors look like they have good judgement.

So, where were you in the Bush years when our deficit soared? Talk about a bunch of drunken sailors...

 

[JamesSD]

LOL! This is the awesomest thing in a while.

I'm pretty sure some frat boy intern at one of these groups suggested calling them "Teabag parties" and held back his snickers long enough to text all his friends when they actually chose that term.

 

[DeeZire]

Watching the antics of the loony right is like watching a flock of lemmings marching off a cliff.

 

[Huckleman2000]

Watching the antics of the loony right is like watching a flock of lemmings marching off a cliff.

Yes. Corporate lobbyists gin up an astroturf campaign inadvertently named for a slang term for ballsucking. It's so completely a clusterfuck that no one could imagine this as a plausible storyline - it's MBA-level epic fail.

This is what comes of having no gay friends.

 

[DesertPirate]

So, where were you in the Bush years when our deficit soared? Talk about a bunch of drunken sailors...

and triple that is a good thing?
I was against most of the spending of the last 16 years.
The blatant payoffs of unions in the spenulous bill are criminal.
I like public flogging for all Congresscritters since the voters are too stupid to replace them.

Notice how I want them all replaced? Regardless of party?

 

[DesertPirate]

Watching the antics of the loony right is like watching a flock of lemmings marching off a cliff.

With Pelosi and Reed leading the way to bankruptcy for the country.
Keep blaming Bush but there has been a less than 25% change in congress in 8 years, they are the criminals.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

At the end of the day America will be as broke as it was at the beginning, and life is about to become difficult for millions of people.

It doesnt matter who the President is, spending bills are created in the House of Representatives. The President creates the budget, then Congress decides how much money to give the President.

The problem we're about to encounter is, there is only enough money to pay for Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, and interest on the national debt. Anything else requires more borrowing and a larger national debt.

 

[trysail]

The problem we're about to encounter is, there is only enough money to pay for Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, and interest on the national debt. Anything else requires more borrowing and a larger national debt.

Succinctly and well put. Somewhere around 2030— if not sooner, the pigeons will come home to roost. At that time, the bill will come due from the promises of "a chicken in every pot" and a free lunch for everybody made by all the politicians. It won't be a pleasant experience.

Literotica is chock-a-block full of innumerates, wishful thinkers and economic illiterates.

_________________________


Bernanke Bet on Keynes Has Meltzer Seeing 1970s-Style Inflation
By Rich Miller

April 13 (Bloomberg) -- Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke is siding with John Maynard Keynes against Milton Friedman by flooding the financial system with money.

If history is any guide, says Allan Meltzer, the effort will end in tears. Inflation “will get higher than it was in the 1970s,” says Meltzer, the Fed historian and professor of political economy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. At the end of that decade, consumer prices rose at a year-over- year rate of 13.3 percent.

Bernanke’s gamble that the highest jobless rate in 25 years and the most idle factory capacity on record will hold down inflation is straight out of the late British economist Keynes. Should late Nobel-prize-winner Friedman’s dictum that “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon” prove right, the $1 trillion or more in liquidity Bernanke has pumped into the financial system by expanding the Fed’s balance sheet may leave him to cope with surging consumer prices.

So far, investors and economic data both back up the Bernanke-Keynes view. The market in Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities as of April 6 indicated long-term inflation expectations of 2.5 percent, below the 2.8 percent average inflation rate of the past 10 years.

Figures to be published April 15 will probably show that the March consumer price index was unchanged from a year earlier, thanks to a steep decline in energy costs, according to economists surveyed by Bloomberg News. In February, the index rose at a year-over-year rate of just 0.2 percent.

Still, the 2.5 percent expectation represents an increase from 2.1 percent at the end of last year. And Meltzer, 81, who has written an 800-page history of the Fed’s first 38 years and is now working on volume two, isn’t alone in seeing a return of sky-high inflation as a result of Bernanke’s policies.

John Brynjolfsson, chief investment officer at hedge fund Armored Wolf in Aliso Viejo, California, says the Fed is still in the early stages of its effort to pump up the economy.

“We’ve got at least nine innings of reflation ahead of us, ultimately ending with probably double-digit inflation,” he said in a Bloomberg Television interview on April 6.

Investors are starting to protect themselves from the risk of faster price increases by buying TIPS, pushing up the return on the securities to 6.1 percent in March, the best performance since the U.S. government introduced them in 1997, according to Merrill Lynch & Co. index data.

Behind investors’ caution: a ballooning Fed balance sheet that has climbed $1.2 trillion in the past year to $2.09 trillion and expanded the nation’s money supply. It is poised to increase even further after last month’s Fed decision to buy an additional $1.15 trillion worth of assets, including $300 billion in Treasury securities.

M2, a broad measure of the money supply that includes checking accounts and money-market mutual funds, rose in the last six months at an annual rate of 14 percent. That compares with an average 6.3 percent during the last decade.

Meltzer says political pressure will prevent Bernanke, 55, and fellow policy makers from withdrawing liquidity quickly enough as the economy recovers. That’s similar to the pattern that occurred back in the 1970s, he says. Then-Chairman Arthur Burns allowed excessive money-supply growth because he was unable or unwilling to resist pressure from President Richard Nixon’s White House to hold down unemployment, leading to the “great inflation” of that era, he says.

Now, Bernanke and fellow policy makers have “squandered their independence” by becoming involved in bailouts of financial firms and by taking long-term and illiquid assets onto their balance sheet, Meltzer says. “They don’t have the political ability to control inflation.”

John Ryding, founder of RDQ Economics LLC in New York and a former Fed economist, agrees that the central bank will be slow to soak up all the cash it has injected into the financial system, in part because policy makers will be fixated on still- high unemployment. The rate rose to 8.5 percent in March, compared with 7.2 percent in December.

“They pay lip service to inflation being a monetary phenomenon,” he says. “But they’re too much concerned with the Keynesian explanation of inflation.”

There are signs that the Fed’s stimulus -- combined with the efforts of central banks and governments elsewhere in the world, including China -- is starting to lift some commodity prices. Copper rose to a five-month high and platinum reached a six-month peak on April 9.

“All that money is going to find a home,” says Ken Mayland, president of ClearView Economics LLC in Pepper Pike, Ohio. He sees oil prices increasing to “$80, $90, $100 before the end of next year” from $52 a barrel now.

Commodity prices may be more prone to rise as the world economy recovers because tight credit and volatile pricing will discourage investment in new supplies, says Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com, in West Chester, Pennsylvania.

Chesapeake Energy Corp. of Oklahoma City, and Houston-based Carrizo Oil & Gas Inc. are among energy producers that are limiting spending and curbing drilling after a collapse in credit markets drove up debt costs.

Some Fed policy makers seem more worried about deflation than they do about inflation. A sustained fall in prices can debilitate the economy by causing consumers and businesses to postpone purchases.

“For some time to come, disinflation, and even deflation, will represent greater risks than inflation,” San Francisco Fed President Janet Yellen said in a speech on March 25.

At the root of that concern is substantial and growing slack in the economy, which, according to White House chief economist Christina Romer, is operating 5 percent to 10 percent below potential. That means the economy will have to grow a percentage point above trend -- reckoned by the administration to be about 2.5 percent annually -- for five or more years before the slack is used up.

The Phillips curve -- developed by economist A.W. Phillips using Keynesian concepts -- posits that such excess will reduce inflation as firms stuck with idle capacity cut prices and workers facing layoffs accept smaller wage hikes.

Not everyone at the Fed buys into that argument. Noting that some economists forecast substantial slack will keep inflation low for several years, Richmond Fed President Jeffrey Lacker said in a March 26 speech that he would be “cautious about relying on this correlation.”

The Fed is “running a laboratory experiment” on what drives inflation: the money supply or the output gap, says Laurence Meyer, a former Fed governor and now vice chairman of St. Louis-based Macroeconomic Advisers

“How it turns out will do a lot to influence the economic debate,” he says, adding that his money is on Bernanke.

 

[3113]

Succinctly and well put. Somewhere around 2030— if not sooner, the pigeons will come home to roost.

Listen, asshat, the problem is the pigeons have already come home to roost. Enough "liberals" voted for Bush to be in office twice and he and his cronies put us into this mess that Obama just inherited. Now whether or not Obama makes it worse or better, the pigeons are well and truly here.

No one here is, as you seem to imagine, that naive or stupid or is after a "chicken in every pot" or a car in every garage (though given the car situation right now, maybe that promise can come true), or a free lunch--too many here are hardworking and afraid of losing their jobs to imagine that. We know we're fucked. And we knew it the minute G.W. marched on into Iraq. We knew it THEN. All we missed was the scope of how fucked we were going to be by the additional ponzi schemes every bank and investment firm was running, thanks to the idea that they could self-regulate, to add to G.W.'s Iraq ponzi scheme to funnel tax dollars to his buddies.

You've been here long enough that you should know better than to insult us by claiming something so prosaic and boring as "you're all wearing rose-colored glasses!" We've got people from around the world here. We KNOW what other forms of government are like, economically and politically. We KNOW nothing is magic.

Do you? Do the people at Fox know if all they can do about it is toss a teabag at someone?

And now, I'm going back to my teabagging party. Anyone wanna drop their pants?

 

[voluptuary_manque]

Listen, asshat, the problem is the pigeons have already come home to roost. Enough "liberals" voted for Bush to be in office twice and he and his cronies put us into this mess that Obama just inherited. Now whether or not Obama makes it worse or better, the pigeons are well and truly here.

No one here is, as you seem to imagine, that naive or stupid or is after a "chicken in every pot" or a car in every garage (though given the car situation right now, maybe that promise can come true), or a free lunch--too many here are hardworking and afraid of losing their jobs to imagine that. We know we're fucked. And we knew it the minute G.W. marched on into Iraq. We knew it THEN. All we missed was the scope of how fucked we were going to be by the additional ponzi schemes every bank and investment firm was running, thanks to the idea that they could self-regulate, to add to G.W.'s Iraq ponzi scheme to funnel tax dollars to his buddies.

You've been here long enough that you should know better than to insult us by claiming something so prosaic and boring as "you're all wearing rose-colored glasses!" We've got people from around the world here. We KNOW what other forms of government are like, economically and politically. We KNOW nothing is magic.

Do you? Do the people at Fox know if all they can do about it is toss a teabag at someone?

And now, I'm going back to my teabagging party. Anyone wanna drop their pants?

Oh twist my paw a little further!

 

[Stella_Omega]

Stock tip of the day; Buy Lipton's!

And 3113 is right, Trysail. We all of us know we are fucked, and we all of us know that it's not going to get better real fast.

It's not only taxes, for godsake. There's a war that's killing a lot of people, and there are mercenary camps in my backyard. There are civil rights violations, of prisoners and of our own fellow citizens. There is desctruction of our resources for the sake of a momentary profit. There is the loss of basic skills that have been making our nation into a parasite, utterly dependent on the very same nations we are angering with our arrogance.

It isn't only about money.

 

[3113]

Stock tip of the day; Buy Lipton's!

If I were a Senator on the receiving end of such teabags, I'd thank Fox News very much indeed. As teabags have to be sent snail mail, so teabaggers are buying stamps, which go to the government and keep the ailing U.S. Postal Service alive. Excellent. They're stimulating the economy by getting people to buy tea (and that includes sales tax! Added bonus there). AND these teabaggers are providing U.S. representatives with tea to drink so they don't have to use taxpayer money to buy any. Finally, as you point out, someone is bound to buy stock in Lipton's, thus helping the stockmarket, which, evident, gives people more confidence in their government.

Maybe the "teabagging" term isn't inaccurate at all! Fox is getting a lot of people to lick the government's balls.