Ask for a link where the tea party wants to abolish the government. And ask about the 10th amendment to the constituion. Just ask them what it means.
"I'm excited that when there is no more Social Security and Medicare, Grandma gets to move in with me and I get to pay for all her doctor/hospital visits. Can't wait! She's excited about it too."
I would come back with it's a shame our FEDERAL government has long ago spent their savings. If we didn't allow the politicians to take that money from them to begin with those sytems wouldnt' be going bankrupt. Ask them how they plan to fix those systems so that they remain for our grandchildren. Or are our grandkids just goign to pay to take care of us and get screwed when it's their turn to collect.
Ask them how the United States survived before 1913.
Ask them to tell you the percentile of wage earners (top X% of incomes) and the percentage amount of income, when the income tax was established.
Ask them if they like the idea of government workers getting to retire at age 50 or 55 on 80% of the average of their three final years' salary -- even if they get another job.
Ask them if that is more or less "progressive" than now.
"I'm excited that when there is no more Social Security and Medicare, Grandma gets to move in with me and I get to pay for all her doctor/hospital visits. Can't wait! She's excited about it too."
Ask them if they really believe in death panels: hospitals admitting people under Medicare / Medicaid face stiff penalties if they re-admit the same patient for the same disease within 30 days, even if it's an emergency, even if the doctor made a mistake.
Point out that under Obamacare, healthy 20-somethings will have their premiums go UP to subsidize the elderly. Before Obamacare, the ratio of premiums was 7:1 -- now it will go down to 3:1.
Insurers typically charge six or seven times as much to older customers as to younger ones in states with no restrictions. The new law limits the ratio to 3-to-1, meaning a 50-year-old could be charged only three times as much as a 20-year-old.
The rest will be shouldered by young people in the form of higher premiums.
Ask them if they approve of the OBAMA justice department pushing for the right to read your emails and browser history for up to 2 years WITHOUT a warrant.
Ask them if they liked Bush's response to Katrina.
Then point out Obama wants them to wait longer than that if their city gets hit by a terrorist nuke.
Cheers!
Ask them why the health care bill was so massive and incomprehensible that no one really understands everything that is in it including the idiots that voted for it. Here is a clue for them, it's about control.
After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville, “Democracy in America”
The roads are paid for by tolls, gasoline taxes, and car licensing. While they are taxes, they are USER fees. Those who do not drive a car don't pay them (that includes the freeloading bicycle riding anarchists in Critical Mass). Tax bicycles NOW.
National defense IS one of the stated roles of government.
I could do without public schools, they don't serve the public. Between the NEA union and the radical Safe Schools Czar (who was part of the Fistgate controvesy teaching fisting to kids), we don't need federal influence on our courses.
If labor laws are so good, let's impose them on all nations so that we can equally compete in the marketplace rather than offshoring jobs to achieve lower costs and higher performance.
Environmental laws passed by the EPA are an unconstitutional to our 3 branches of government with a separation of powers component.
Social security is a ponzi scheme and clearly medicare/medicade aren't working (A)because insured patients and those who are self-pay pick up the "unpaid" costs of medic-patients and (B)we wouldn't need to put all Americans under Obamacare if we could have simply insured the uninsured by expanding the coverage under medicare/medicade.
Our monetary system is a joke since we went off the gold standard. Printing funny money is not the answer. China is waking up to this reality.
As to "teabagger", it is a homosexual slur, so when your liberal friends use it, they are being "homophobic" just as they were when they called Iraq War supporting Americans "Chickenhawks", a term for a man who chases boys.
None of the tea party patriots are calling for an "end" to government. They are calling for SMALLER government and more self/independent reliance. Charitable giving will go down as people are taxes more and the deductions for directed giving go away.
Tea party patriots love this country and oppose Obama's brand of "CHANGE" just as they opposed Hillarycare and the other Clinton agenda items they tried to ram through 1993-1994 (which ended when the GOP took back the House and Senate). It isn't racism that drives this. It isn't sexism that caused opposition to Hillarycare. It is a rejection of Socialism.