The Tea Party is made up of people who can do math.

Larry  Correia
October 17, 2013
The scientific Tea Party
[Citation here.

Of course they can do math! The Tea Party was a response to Obama Care and the massive government spending. And you probably didn’t even need to “do math” to figure that out. Mere arithmetic should be more than adequate for the task. But those on the left had to think of the Tea Party as inferiors in order to justify the condescending attacks. Apparently those on the left can’t handle or don’t want to be bothered with the arithmetic.

I don’t remember where I saw it but I remember reading many years ago something to the effect that politics was much too important to be subject to the impersonal rigors of mere numbers. Whoever said seemed to believe they had expressed some great truth. My thought was, and is, that numbers are a measure of reality. If you can’t express something in numbers then it’s just opinion. There is, of course, no guarantee that any given set of numbers reflect reality but if you can’t or won’t express something in number then it’s a pretty sure bet that it’s an opinion without basis in reality. And if your opinions don’t have any basis in reality you have no, zero, nada, zilch, business being involved in politics.

But that’s not the political system works. Unfortunately reality can only be ignored for so long. If reality could be ignored then something like this would make sense (H/T to ubu52 who said, “It’s total Fail to look at this as a math problem”). Where ‘this’ is the deficit. I was tempted to respond but I’m not sure the intended recipient would (or could) understand. If the deficit isn’t a math (or arithmetic) problem and the amount of spending being greater than revenue isn’t a valid concern then why not just print enough money that everyone in the country (or heck, why not the entire world?) receives $100 an hour for 40 hours per week “following their dreams” or whatever? Everyone could retire and live happily ever after. We could forget the debate over Obamacare because everyone could afford to pay for their own health care or buy the insurance of their choice, right? Everyone could afford to pay for their own education or not bother with it, right?

Numbers matter. If you can’t do arithmetic then you are going have some serious problems with math. And math is what bonds us to reality. If you can’t do math you don’t really understand reality. And that Tea Party members understand math and science better than those that can’t do simple arithmetic is no surprise.

What the Yale Professor who “discovered” what was blindly obvious to me and I would have thought most people didn’t conclude, which is also obvious to me, is that those who denigrate the Tea Party are those who truly deserve the condescending insults, jeers, and casual dismissal. And we have the numbers to back that up.—Joe]