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New American Majority Eclipsing the Tea Party

October 12, 2011
Blog

October 12, 2011

Finally, the Tea Party Republicans have met their match and are being increasingly isolated--and I am not referring only to the emerging Occupy Wall Street national protests, whose impact is only beginning to be felt. Congressional Republicans have now spawned a strong reaction that ranging from Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and most economists to a new American majority. Only 31 percent of the American people favor the Republican spending-cuts-only approach to the economy compared with 64 percent who want to reduce the deficit through a combination of tax increases and spending cuts. In comparison, the President's jobs plan gets a 52 percent majority. Chairman Bernanke agrees, judging from his comments at Woodshull in July after the debt-ceiling debacle and again earlier this month at a joint economic committee hearing, where he warned ominously that congressional action is necessary now because "the economy is close to faltering." Even Standard & Poor's, the first ratings agency to downgrade the U.S. credit rating in our history, was so unnerved by the debt-ceiling spectacle that it said that the "downgrade…assumes that…tax cuts due to expire remain in place…and the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues."

It is no wonder that young people, who are out front in the Occupy Wall Street movement, are leading the most visible reaction to congressional inertia. They see the economic inequality that they complain about as their future, a future with fewer jobs, less income, and big college debt as the reward for the expensive education they were told was the passport to the good life the American way. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's (R-VA) only answer to the outcry for jobs in the country is to repeal the Environmental Protection Agency and to cut food stamps. While criticizing the President's jobs bill, Cantor should be careful whom he labels as "mobs." The young people in the streets today look more like a vanguard.

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