It all comes back to that healthcare plan.

Like the settlements built by Israeli extremists on contested lands, I don't think you understand exactly how much ... hate (for lack of a better word) that created in the land. And how, much as some might now like, you can't just wave a magical wand and make it go away, when it's convenient for you.

People hate being told what they have to buy, what they personally need, especially when it's going to cost them. We can't even pretend that the Affordable Care Act is going bring down, or control, healthcare costs.

No, it's just tossing in a bunch of as-of-yet healthy non-consumers into the mix, for a short-term injection of premium dollars to keep the system afloat. Think beyond tomorrow?

That's why, Mr. Krugman, nobody much trusts the "experts" anymore to tinker in plans that will personally, mandatorily, affect our own personal bottom lines. Because they don't know us, and they don't have our own best interests at heart. Bureacracy is like that. Personally, I don't much care what Washington does, when I can opt out.

But when it's going to cost me, in terms of my pocketbook and more importantly, in terms of my future choices, well that's about where my trust level ends and my pragmatic side takes over.

Just like I don't much care when my neighbor buys more and more commerical goods, on credit. Or has babies he can't afford to support, when you calculate in the long-term costs of raising children. But ask me to bail him out and pay his bills? To feed his spoiled (by my standards) children? Suddenly, his overspending and lack of personal fiscal discipline is my concern.

It's simply untrue that all Americans went on a spending binge in the past decades. That none of us planned ahead, and we're all being caught short. Some of us did make modest choices, and budgeted accordingly. We didn't create this mess, and we resent it being "fixed" on our backs, out of our own future choices.

Plus, I wonder if Krugman -- he of the "listen to others, even Gentiles" advice -- can actually hear how condescending he comes off here? It's not that we're too stupid to understand, it's just that ... we haven't been properly educated by the media and pundits that serve us.

So what do most news reports say? They portray it as a situation in which both sides are equally partisan, equally intransigent — because news reports always do that. And we have influential pundits calling out for a new centrist party, a new centrist president, to get us away from the evils of partisanship.

The reality, of course, is that we already have a centrist president — actually a moderate conservative president. Once again, health reform — his only major change to government — was modeled on Republican plans, indeed plans coming from the Heritage Foundation. And everything else — including the wrongheaded emphasis on austerity in the face of high unemployment — is according to the conservative playbook.

What all this means is that there is no penalty for extremism; no way for most voters, who get their information on the fly rather than doing careful study of the issues, to understand what’s really going on.

Sure. And if only we would have listened harder, and learned more details, we'd all learn to love the ACA, despite it's Constitutional dubiousness.

Now I too wish Mr. Krugman had been better blessed with a gift for ... persuasion. I mean, it must be tough sitting there on the sidelines as an economic expert, and yet no one is willing to buy into your ideas anymore -- not after endorsing that Christmas Eve healthcare bill that passed over the objections of the people when the rest of the country was out on holiday -- no matter how hard you might be trying to communicate them and show the country the way out.

It's like, being the only Boy Scout who knows the way out of the forest as darkness falls, yet for whatever reason (the Enron advising stint?), nobody in leadership power will listen to you and the bigger boys are forever taking us down the wrong paths.

Still, pretending the rest of us are too stupid to understand, or rather -- we just don't have the time or proper resources to further our understandings -- is a bit of a mockery. Truth be told, it is a morals thing.

Some of us believe that that our fellow countrymen, particularly those on Wall Street and in Washington, have such contempt for the country that as long as they "get theirs", it doesn't much matter if the team as a whole loses. We get it. We're just valuable when we pay the taxes and contribute, but nevermind listening to us on program priorities, proper incentives, personal freedoms, or overseas policies, to name a few areas of disagreement.

That's what the Tea Party movement is all about, Charlie Brown.