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Opinion: Steeped in outrage

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Marc Cooper’s op-ed ridiculing the tea-party protest phenomenon didn’t just hit a nerve -- it kicked it repeatedly. And, in keeping with Newton’s Third Law, readers kicked back. Hard. We’ve received well over 1,000 comments so far, which you can read here. Apologies in advance for the cumbersome layout, which allows you to see only 10 comments at a time. That’s particularly unfortunate in this case; with so many comments consisting of little more than ‘You moron!’ (or words to that effect), you have to wade through a few dozen to cobble together a complete picture of the protesters’ motivations.

Although many of the commenters don’t seem to have read Cooper’s piece, they collectively make a point that Cooper overlooked: the amount of deficit spending and the added debt projected over the next decade have no precedent in the lives of anyone born after World War II. It’s that burden that many in the movement are rebelling against. Likening it to the deficit spending of the recent Bush years (or the Reagan or George H.W. Bush terms) doesn’t ring true with readers because of the startling difference in scale. Another issue: unlike Cooper, who takes Keynesian economics as a given, the tea-party crowd doesn’t buy the premise that the $787 billion stimulus package Congress passed in February will revive the economy, costing less in the long term than doing nothing.

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There’s no real point now in debating the value of the stimulus. We won’t be able to see its effects until the money really starts to flow later this year. Yet what the tea-party phenomenon illustrates, I think, is that Congress’ and the administration’s zeal to move quickly meant that we’re having debates now that we should have had prior to the bill’s passage. Ditto for the $700-billion Wall Street bailout. The president (George W. Bush or Barack Obama, your choice) can argue that the country’s financial future is at state, but that doesn’t mean people will believe him. Pile on top of that Obama’s first budget, with its grandiose spending plans and its attempt to transfer more wealth from the richest to the working class, and you’ve planted the seeds for plenty of distrust. The irony is, Obama has tried to explain the rationale behind his actions to a degree we don’t usually hear from politicians. His speech yesterday about the economy was a good example.

That’s not to say we’d be better off had Washington held off efforts to alleviate the credit crunch and boost the economy until there was greater consensus. There’s little hope of that in an era when people on opposing sides of the debate reflexively label each other socialists, fascists or nut-jobs. (Again, read the comments on Cooper’s piece for a taste of that.) The degree of mutual resentment is pretty breathtaking.

The Times’ opinion pages includes another tasty tax-day morsel: the editorial board explains how California’s reliance on progressive taxation exacerbates the cyclical budget problems:

It has long been the position of many would-be tax reformers on the left that California’s income taxes must be even more progressive, to pump needed revenue into state programs from the highest earners and to ease the tax burden on the middle class. The very wealthy are a common target for new revenues, in part because, well, they have the money. But the more progressive an income tax becomes -- or the greater the share of the income tax burden that is borne by the rich -- the more harrowing the revenue roller-coaster ride. That’s because the wealthy get such a large chunk of their income from capital gains and investments. Economic swings have a greater impact on that kind of income than on wages and salaries, which are the typical sources for lower and middle earners.

Also today, we have an editorial on efforts by some payday lenders to dodge state regulations, an editorial and an op-ed on the Cuba travel ban, and a column by Tim Rutten on Irish poet Seamus Heaney and the importance of the arts during a recession.

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