Also, the fact that the study didn’t look at EVERY person who filed bankruptcy doesn’t make it invalid as your statement tries to make us believe. It is called “random sampling,” and is a common, statistically valid form of analysis that has been around for eons. Unlike your discredited “Fraser Study” (see below), this study, completed by Harvard professors with only their reputations and livelihoods on the line, uses valid empirical methods of study, vs selective use of facts and statistics like in the Fraser “study.” Your false equivocations and trying to invalidate something that follows accepted methods of study protocol is a typical move right out of the right-wing handbook. If that is how you think, then you should never, ever believe a single poll that is reported by Fox News, or any other news source, because each and every one uses the same exact methodology.

Oh, and your vaunted Fraser Institute Study? Basically all but a fraud. Here is just the first paragraph from a well-known blog on bankruptcy law founded by 8 academics who practice, teach, and study the issue every day:

“The National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) is flogging a study from the Fraser Institute in Canada that purports to show U.S. medical bankruptcies are a “myth” because the Canadian bankruptcy rate is higher than in the United States. Reuters and BusinessWire have run the NCPA’s press release as a story on their news services. Before anyone takes this study seriously, a few important facts are needed to place the Fraser Institute findings in context. To be as charitable as possible, the study’s use of the bankruptcy data is extremely selective.”

They go on to say the Fraser Study plays fast and loose with their statistics, and doesn’t even use 2008 stats from both the US and Canada, both of which are readily available, and which have a significant impact on the resulting figures. Yeah, that’s some reliable stuff you can really “bank” on. You can read the entire article debunking your statistically invalid source here. And, you can read up on the REAL credentials of the author who is a professor for the Chicago School of Law and specializes in credit and bankruptcy law here:

With regard to your comments about obesity, smoking, etc, I am in total agreement with you that much more focus needs to be on healthy living and preventive care. But you totally and completely miss the point about that because our current health care system purposely focuses on “reactive” care vs “preventive” care. That’s because (of course) reactive care (expensive ER treatments, use of expensive machines like MRIs, and expensive drugs) is WAY more profitable for health care providers and drug companies than preventive care is. Whereas, the vast majority of other industrialized nations who have universal health care spend MUCH more time, effort, and money on preventive care in the first place, WHICH IS WHY THEIR PEOPLE ARE HEALTHIER, LIVE LONGER LIVES, AND HAVE LOWER INCIDENCE OF DISEASE AND INFANT MORTALITY. You rant about the lack of attention paid to healthy living and preventive care, yet bash universal health care in other countries who focus on those exact things. I love it.

And finally, you conclude by making a comment (meant to be viewed negatively) about “socialized medicine.” However, I’ve already demonstrated in 1 of the 10 facts listed in this post how what is being proposed is NOT socialized medicine. That somehow, a single payer system is inferior to the gouging system we currently have. If that is what you believe, then please explain to me why Medicare (a single payer health system encompassing 10s of millions of “high usage” seniors) seems to work so well for the vast majority who use it and why it has administrative expenses which utterly dwarf those of private insurance plans? I’ll look forward to responses from you which are much more rigorous and well-supported.

Furthermore, what really invalidates the whole premise for this contrived protest is the first question that popped into my head when I heard about it:

“After eight years of deregulation resulting in the collapse of our banking industry, outrageous wasteful spending and record deficits by the Bush administration, suddenly we feel the need to protest a new administration barely three months old that is desperately trying to rectify the situation?”

Where was the outrage then??

Regarding the points you made:

1) I did not see that in the people that I talked to. I’m sure there were people there who were reacting in a very basic, visceral way, with no real knowledge of what’s going on with these protests, but many of the people I talked to DID understand taxation concepts. They were largely upset with the way their money is being spent/wasted. I wanted to get reactions from people to a Gallup poll that was just released saying 61% of people surveyed thought the taxes they paid this year were fair. Unfortunately, I didn’t get the opportunity.

2) That I really disagree with. No one I talked to seemed ignorant of the basic concepts of representative democracy. If anything, I thought the people I talked to were above average in that knowledge arena. Surely there were plenty of people there who fall into the “clueless” category, but that would be true of any large group protesting one thing or the other.

3) Again, I disagree. The people I interviewed were very engaged, and several of them told me they call and write their reps on a regular basis. I don’t think you can make that generalization in any kind of provable way. I think the person who made the comment about “taxation without representation” was more referring to the wasteful and suspect ways the gov’t spends our money, but that person did not say it very clearly.

4) Maybe you’re right, maybe not. Again, those I interviewed did not strike me that way at all, but it’s possible the majority of the people there might not be as engaged as they should be. Again, I think that would be true of any protest group.

While I believe that, on the whole, these tea party protests were largely a “fake” outrage fomented by right-wing astroturf organizations like FreedomWorks.org, and were played up mostly in right-wing news media, they did attract a lot of honest folks who are sick and tired of seeing our tax money wasted and given away in the form of bailouts, no-bid contracts, and outright thievery.

I’m sure there were many well-meaning folks at these rallies, but based on this and a wide range of reports I’ve seen and read, I would surmise that most of these people:

1) Really don’t have any notion of what the purpose of taxation is, nor how it works, nor any historical context – eg. knowledge of fact that taxes are considerably lower now than they were under Reagan.

2) Really don’t have a clue how our representative government works.

3) Have not voted in the majority of state and local elections over the last 10 years (Guess that’s to provide credence to their claims of “taxation without representation”)

4) Have the attention span of seafood. The “movement” was over by the time they dropped their signs.