Tea Party impact: least productive Congress in 40 years.

There's a piece of a Bruce Cockburn lyric from years ago that comes to mind: "the grinding devolution of the democratic dream."

Absolutely backwards. More legislation=greater productivity? Are you kidding?

And no, I'm not claiming they were productive either. LOL, far from it.

Here's an interesting exercise. Take a stock market chart, say the Dow, for the last 5 years. After the total tanking of the market in the last year or two of the Bush administration (2007 and especially 2008), in which the market lost about 45% of its value, stocks have been rising ever since.

But not evenly. During this long steady climb, which started when Obama was elected, there have been several big dips. Those dips coincide with two types of events. One event type relates to news that Europe was nearing default (e.g., Greece). But most of the events coincide with tea party actions.

Tea party actions that made the market tank include the most recent fiscal cliff fight, the budget hostage taking, and the other major tea party hostage taking event - the debt ceiling fake event. In each of these tea party induced fake crises the market reacted by tanking. Not because of the underlying state of the economy, because of the tea party threats to force the US to default on our obligations. The market was tootling along just fine until the tea party stepped in, then the market reacted to the hostage taking by dropping. Once the hostage taking event waged by the tea party passed, the market recovered and continued its climb.

That in itself shows how destructive the tea party has been to the American economy and the American people.

So what is the tea party planning to do next? They are calling for the Republicans to shut down the government. The tea party will fight to increase spending on defense contractors, increase tax loopholes that allow the super-rich and corporations to hide their money from taxation, and increase spending and federal government intervention to ban women's health benefits, force their distorted version of Christianity onto Christians with other beliefs and non-Christians, and any number of other extremist right wing priorities to which they feel everyone in American must conform. Give to the rich, increase federal spending on their priorities, and force the middle class to pay for all of the perks given to others.