Tea'd off

This week's tea party protests seem to have been a mildly successful grassroots effort to show popular sentiment against bailouts and higher taxes.

I'm sympathetic, to a degree. The Bush administration blamed its overspending on its predecessors and its political rivals. The Obama administration is doing the same. And the national debt mounts.

I personally wish that the nation's best economic minds had a more free-market, fiscally conservative approach to stimulus and bailout programs. But they don't. The pols who posture about posterity's unbearable debt load are too cowardly to present real solutions -- solutions that would involve political accountability. John McCain promised to "go after pork" -- even though pork is not much more of an issue in the federal deficit than it is in a Jewish deli. No one seems serious about tackling debt.

And yet we have to pull the nation out of a ditch, and that seems to cost money. We have to get the nation's engine running again, and the best minds claim a laissez-faire approach won't get that baby humming anytime soon. I don't believe that, if a Republican had won instead of Obama, we'd be somehow lowering our debt over its current levels.

I wish there were a better way, but no one has stepped forward to show that way. And the tea-party crowd seems painfully naive in going after the new administration as the partisan source of all our collective irresponsibilities.