myerstownherald.com

The person of the year this year actually is more than one person. This year’s person of the year is a group of people. This year’s person of the year is the Tea Party Protesters.
This group of people from around the country, including some high-profile protesters in Lebanon County, stood up to the government and called attention to out of control spending. Fiscal policy normally is written off as boring, an area that most people would like to leave to someone else to manage. But this group of protesters shined a light on the soaring deficits and seemingly limitless fiscal appetite of President Obama’s administration. As the Obama administration seeks to gobble up the health-care industry like Pac-Man, the protesters at least were able to stop some of the damage.
The protesters came to the fore after the so-called Stimulus Plan that Obama said would revive the economy. Congress passed this giant bill in a hurry to avoid debate. As people began to realize that the bill was nothing more than a bunch of ill-conceived, haphazard pork projects, and not a plan to revive the economy at all, they began fighting back, calling out the liberal politicians who passed this monstrosity.
Their momentum continued as Obama started to roll out his health-care plan, which seemed like a disguised attempt to create a government run health-care bureaucracy. This bureaucracy seemed like another government boondoggle that would make health care worse for most people while driving up the cost.
Thanks to the protesters and their strident confrontation of Congressional supporters of the bill, the most costly public option and expansion of Medicare portions of the bill have been dropped. Unfortunately, a health-care bill did pass the Senate, after the Democrats used pork barrel spending to buy off supposedly moderate members of their party.
Despite the passage of a bill in the Senate, the protesters accomplished quite a bit by defeating the public option. For people who call them hypocrites because they did not attack existing government programs, such as Medicare, this argument is off base. Once these programs are created, they are almost impossible to roll back because people rearrange their lives to depend on whatever the government is providing. The best way to prevent out of control spending is not to pass such programs in the first place.
In short, the protesters have served as the fiscal conscience of the nation. The goal of providing health care to everyone is a noble one, but when the government takes over, it drains money from the economy, hampering job creation, weakening the dollar, and putting the United States in a precarious position of having to borrow money from foreign countries just to pay our bills.
The protesters looked at Washington and saw nothing but irresponsibility. They demanded accountability, and actually were able to slim down portions of President Obama’s agenda, despite the fact that Democrats have large majorities in Congress. For their hard work and their success, the Tea Party Protesters are the Herald Person of the Year.