Ron Paul tells Tea Party they are being "taken for a ride"

In private conversations and even some debates on John Cornyn's Facebook page, I have mentioned that the Tea Party won't ever create the change they want working within the Republican or Democratic Party. It appears I am not alone.

Ron Paul wrote that the Tea Party is being "taken for a ride" by the Right by the likes of Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck.

Paul is correct in his statements that we can't possibly deal with real deficit reduction with 700 military bases in over 120 nations around the world; we can't possibly deal with the deficit while fighting wars overseas that we haven't paid for; we can't possibly deal with deficits while paying for urban projects that belong to local governments to build on the federal budget.

However, Paul doesn't go far enough in his explanation. The GOP, which is where most of the Tea Party resides, has been a party of small government talk for the last forty years, but hasn't done anything to actually cut the budget or reduce deficits at all. The best they can do is lay claim to racing Bill Clinton in the 90s for deficit reduction, but that credit really belongs to Ross Perot for scaring both parties into reducing the deficit. Even in that case, they didn't shrink spending, they raised revenues with a tax increase and slowed the growth of spending.

To think the Republican Party has any hope of shrinking spending is a joke. Listen to the candidates. Not one is running on cutting spending enough to put even a small dent in the deficit, and they aren't willing to raise taxes. Until they are ready to list hundreds of billions of spending cuts in annual spending, not some 10 year projection, they can't possibly be taken seriously for the goals of the Tea Party.

And Ron Paul knows it.