Obama Presidency: Second Term (2013–present): Why could the Tea Party-led GOP ruin the United States?

While I believe the US should really keep their spending in check, I just don't approve of the Tea Party's plans to reduce the budget deficit. When you are running on a budget deficit, you have to make a choice between, say, the military and healthcare. Pulling the troops out of Afghanistan slowly would be good start, a much better option compared to leaving Americans without basic healthcare. The issue I have with the Tea Party and the GOP in general is that they are starting to become too conservative. They seem like the type of people who will send you to the CIA for "enhanced interrogation techniques" because you do not believe in their religion. I am not a fan of their corporate lobbying tactics, nor do I see the government shutdown as some sort of victory for the people. Just a view from someone with relatives living and voting in the U.S.

No.  The tea Party's main objective is to have the country not spend more than it takes in in taxes.  Every state and family does this.  It is common sense. On the other hand, when the President says we have to raise the debt ceilings because we have already spent the money, he is distancing himself from the problem he is failing to fix.  He is classless and irresponsible for saying so. This is the problem with spending and tax receipts Having this much disconnect between spending and tax receipts is an existential threat to the USA.  Other Presidents have found considerable success by finding common ground with fiscal conservatives like Bill Clinton did with Newt Gingrich in 1992-2000.  Our current President is opposed to such collaboration.

What far too many people who support the Tea Party, and those who don't, don't understand about the Tea Party, is that their economic theories of government are over two hundred years old, and if enacted into a modern, 21st century, industrialized and somewhat highly educated nation, would take us back to the late 18th or even early 19th centuries. People like myself, who went to college need jobs that a modern economy provides, and that government investment insures. On top of that, the Tea Party adds in a slavish devotion to the crackpot notions of Ayn Rand, who needed government assistance (Social Security and Medicare) before she died. If Paul Ryan had been around before she died, she would have lost her Social Security and Medicare coverage. These programs have worked and have kept the middle class afloat, and even gave them comfortable retirements. If that is taken away for future generations, then we will go back to the days when there were only two main classes...the wealthy and everyone else, with a small middle class that supported the well-to-do, as they did in towns and cities across the country in the decades before the New Deal. This is not b/s, it is the truth. Today's middle class, or what is left of it, was created out of the social reforms of the late 19th and early 20th century, and to undo all of that is to condemn the 99% to poverty, and that is already happening as families that once had one or two good paying jobs, sent their kids to college or were planning to, and had nice, comfortable homes, are losing or have lost their homes, their life savings, and their kids college funds because money, like water, goes in another direction when it is blocked from moving freely. So, the Tea Party, who by all accounts are well-off whites mostly, and the free-market, billionaires like Romney (R Money) are getting the money the middle class is losing. And that is a recipe for disaster. Or to put it another way, thanks to Robert Reich, is Inequality for All.