Heritage Foundation

By Bethany Murpgy

By most accounts, the tea party movement started with a rant by Rick Santelli on CNBC about government bailouts. This sparked a movement of concerned Americans motivated to change the system of government spending and waste.

Today, the tea party is a critical force in American politics, “that inner voice that speaks to us when things go wrong — the conscience of the nation at a crucial point in our history.” That’s how Heritage President Ed Feulner and Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) put it in their much-discussed Politico article.

We are at a turning point. Government spending has skyrocketed to unmanageably high levels. Concerned Americans are organizing in homes, at town hall meetings, at rallies. They meet and wonder, “Is the American Dream dead for me?”

In primary elections this year, tea party candidates upset establishment favorites in a dozen or more races. Importantly, they argue that American principles—conservative principles—should guide policy decisions.

“The tea party seeks answers to such questions not in the dictates of Washington today but in our country’s founding principles,” DeMint and Feulner write. “There, it finds a prescription for constitutional, limited government based on God-given rights — not a Utopian blueprint for bureaucratic-managed change. “The Heritage Foundation has put its support behind the tea party movement. We support their effort to reform Washington and limit the ability of the bloated federal government to interfere in the everyday lives of Americans.

The tea party movement recognizes that the future of liberty depends on America reclaiming the true nature of the Constitution and the rule of law.

Fortuitously, Heritage scholar Matt Spalding has written a new book, We Still Hold These Truths, to help educate Americans on what the Constitution says – and, importantly, what it doesn’t say. The Weekly Standard described this book as “the single best introduction to the political thought of the American Founding.”

To supplement his book, Spalding has created a companion study guide and video series, available at WeStillHoldTheseTruths.org. These materials are intended for Americans — liberals, conservatives, tea partiers — so they can come together to study our great nation’s Founding in order to create a blueprint to restore America to her core ideals.

> Other Heritage Work of Note

• The growth of government has led not only to massive new spending but to a severe moral problem as well: more and more Americans depend on government to get by. “Government support for dependent persons has grown from $7,293 per person in 1962 to $31,950 last year,” writes Heritage economist William Beach.  Beach, a senior fellow of Heritage, recently released the 2010 Index of Dependence on Government and appeared on John Stossel’s Fox Business program last night to explain why this is important.
• Heritage’s Katryn Nix and Derek Pyburn point conservatives to several new websites with information on the various state lawsuits against Obamacare.
• In making the case for still more “stimulus” spending, leftist New York Times columnist Paul Krugman argues that “there never was a big expansion of government spending.”  This is simply false, according to Heritage’s Brian Riedl: “Federal spending has just finished its largest two-year surge in nearly 60 years, leaping from 20.7 percent of the economy to 25.4 percent.”
• Liberal lawmakers have failed to keep campaign promises about spending, according to Heritage’s Robert Bluey.  In 2007, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) guaranteed the American public that Congress would use the PAYGO method to minimize deficits by offsetting all new spending with cuts or tax increases.  But Bluey says this hasn’t happened: “In fact, since Democrats took office in 2007, the deficit has spiked to $1.5 trillion, up from $160 billion four years ago.”

> In Other News

• “The Obama administration is set to report Friday that the federal budget deficit exceeded $1 trillion for the second straight year,” the AP reports. The problem is that Congress keeps hiking spending.
• Dutch prosecutors now seek the acquittal of Geert Wilders, a parliamentarian opposed to the growing influence of Islamic law in his country. He had been accused of hate crimes for his stances.
• Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad again denounced Israel and called for its destruction while standing on its border.
• New York officials have shut down the largest Medicare fraud in history. Organized by Armenian gangsters, the fraud targeted $160 million of taxpayer money.
• A federal judge ruled that  a lawsuit filed by several states against Obamacare may proceed.
• Protests continue as Europe faces the consequences of its lavish spending. Rioting Greek bureaucrats blocked the entrance to the ancient acropolis yesterday. Meanwhile, French workers went on strike to protest a modest reform to that nation’s entitlements.
• In September, banks foreclosed on over 100,000 homes.

Bethany Murphy is a writer for MyHeritage.org—a website for members and supporters of The Heritage Foundation. Nathaniel Ward; Amanda Reinecker and Andrew Vitaliti, a Heritage intern, contributed to this report.