They both came out to protest on Monday, two separate rallies separated only by a half-mile of a downtown Chicago street. East of the river were the Tea Partiers, waving flags that read “Don’t Tread on Me” and signs that proclaimed “Not My Brother’s Keeper.” On the west riverbank were demonstrators organized by the liberal MoveOn.org delivering a “tax bill” to Boeing headquarters to protest the fact that the aerospace company paid no taxes.

And a thousand miles east in New York City were a whole bunch of very glum stockbrokers, who watched the market crumple like a beatnik beneath a billy club. Just a few hours before the marching and chanting started up in Chicago, the credit ratings agency Standard & Poor’s announced the U.S. government’s debt would receive a long-term “negative” rating, a symptom of large federal deficits and the first possible step toward stripping the U.S of its AAA credit rating and raising the interest rate paid by the government on bonds.

Or in plain English, away from the political brinksmanship playing out on the banks of the river, Wall Street gave official notice that loaning money to the United States might not be a safe bet anymore. And for all the noise being made on W. Washington Street at those Tax Day protests, the messages coming out of both camps were eerily similar.

But at least that means hope in the bipartisan support for budget reforms, right? Steve Stevlic, the coordinator for the Chicago Tea Party, actually went as far as voicing his approval for the push to close corporate tax loopholes by MoveOn.org in his criticism of the Bush tax cuts. For its part, the statement from MoveOn emphasized that America is not “broke” and that closing those loopholes could address the budget problems.

That sounds suspiciously like common ground. The United States paid $400 billion in interest in the last year, even with the low interests rates that came with the recession – the federal equivalent to a mountain of credit card debt. Might this be an issue where our leaders could sit down and work hand-in-hand for a common sense solution?

So I thought about calling my own Congressman, Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL), to inquire about how he planned to bridge the partisan gap and help solve America’s budget issue. But it turns out I didn’t need to -Walsh conveniently spoke at the Tea Party event. His thoughts, at an event intended to bring solutions to our federal financial woes:

“Our president should be ashamed of himself,” Walsh was quoted by NBC Chicago. “Every policy he believes in is destroying what made America great.”

Call me cynical, but that seemed a bit unlikely to me – you’d think just by dumb luck President Obama might support the odd policy that didn’t destroy America, perhaps the occasional traffic law. And even if he did run on an anti-baseball-and-apple-pie platform, Obama’s shame doesn’t seem to have a major role in plugging the hole in America’s budget.

Then again, Walsh is a fringe conservative, a perpetual candidate who ran as a “socially liberal Republican” in the 90’s then changed his tune to capitalize on anti-Obama sentiment and ride the Tea Party wave into office. Surely MoveOn, which claims to support progressive and moderate Democrats, would have a more substantial platform. A group with 5 million members that claims tax loopholes are the cause of our shortfalls must have a clear, simple agenda for easing that budget burden. So I went to the website, where a promotional statement recruited people to launch their own Tax Day protests.

“The right wing is on the attack,” they begin, before going on to point out that Republicans “take away food aid to hungry pregnant women and children. This is immoral and un-American.”

I won’t speak to the first two claims. But watching the party warriors choke partisan battles out of even the most straightforward problems makes me agree wholeheartedly with MoveOn: This is immoral, and un-American.

It’s easy to see why the budget plan for both parties focuses mainly on blaming the opposition- no one ever won an election by raising taxes and cutting programs and government jobs. The smart move is to play hopscotch over the political third-rails and throw as much mud as possible in the process, even if that never brings an answer to the budget issues.

There’s room for real, measured ideological debate over the way to build an American tax base, debate that might meaningfully reflect partisan values. But on either side of the Chicago River the demonstrations were more about slogans than debate, more politics than policy.

And the $14 trillion national debt kept climbing.

Mike Carson is a Weinberg senior. He can be reached at [email protected]. Illustration by Sophie Jenkins.