Teabagging

The Republican Party is mad Congress won't extend the Bush tax cuts for the rich, so they are portraying their automatic expiration as "taxation without representation."

You would think they might be glad: the increase in government revenue actually contributes to a smaller budget deficits in the years ahead.

It's instructive that the Republicans choose to frame the country's problems this way. If tax paying Americans can be convinced that "government spending" is bad, then the government will just spend it on whoever thinks it is good. It's not like the Republican objective is to end taxation, or big government, or even big government spending. The objective is to minimize public expenditure on the public, because the government's role is to serve the rich at the tax payer's expense. Convincing working people that getting anything in return for their taxes is wrong is a central component of this.

Nobody at any level of power or influence in our society has any illusion that ours is not a system of big government, and, by consequence, a system of big government spending. The practical effect of arguing against "big government spending" within a system of big government spending is that it inevitably preferences certain kinds of spending over others.

This is why when the Republican Party rails against big government spending, it just highlights spending it disagrees with. Assistance to the unemployed is socialism, but the military-industrial complex -- in which the public guarantees the profits of private corporations -- is a patriotic necessity. So it is important to be able to discern between spending that benefits us versus spending that does not.