Nothing screams “Tea Party” like an Uncle Sam costume that appears to have been constructed in a suburban basement from American flags picked up at the local Super Walmart. The getup is particularly Tea Partyesque when coupled with a cardboard sign calling for the restructuring of American government. You can imagine my surprise when I saw this outfit at the Occupy Wall Street protests in Lower Manhattan.

The cable news talking heads, newspaper opinion pages, and blogs from every persuasion have been quick to detail the differences between the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street Movements. This exercise is predictable and does little to gain a deeper understanding of the cumulative historic unrest. Highlighting the common roots between the movements presents a much more useful analysis and reveals two serious shortcomings in modern American governance. First, that U.S. public policy is damaging the nation in an unprecedented manner and second that the nation’s fundamental electoral system disenfranchises folks like Tea Partiers and Wall Street Occupiers.

On Public Policy

At their roots, Wall Street Occupiers and Tea Partyers share the same concerns. They each feel that a privileged and elite sector of society has destroyed the opportunity for everyday Americans’ to live a prosperous life. Both groups couldn’t be any more correct. The American power elites, either working within government or from their corporate corner offices are harming the masses in an unprecedented way. This is most readily noticeable in two ways: unsustainable, unsound U.S. fiscal public policies and their resulting dramatic squeeze of the middle class. These two factors are the parents to both the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street Movements.

Unsound Fiscal Policy

The Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements are most concerned with our nation’s fiscal situation. While several fiscal indicators paint the same picture, looking at just one indicator, national debt, one can see how historically problematic our current state of affairs really is.

Historically, U.S. national debt levels fluctuated in accordance with current events, rising with crises such as the Civil War, Great Depression, and World War II and declining during non-crisis periods. This all changed in 1981, when unlike the previous two hundred years, the U.S. began racking up debt with no apparent accompanying crisis. At the time national debt was 32% of gross domestic product (GDP). Today, national debt is just over 100% of GDP, nearly 15 trillion dollars. Just 10 years ago that figure was 50%. Additionally, there is no clear party to blame; Democrats and Republicans have participated equally in the spending free for all.

National debt may just seem like a figure in outer-space with lots of zeros behind it, but the truth is it has a significant effect on Americans and the relative standing of the U.S. globally. Increased interest rates for American consumers, the weakening of the dollar, and the subordination of the U.S. to lender nations are all very real potential consequences of higher and higher debt.

The worst part about these policies is that they simply kick the fiscal can down the road. Like today’s debt, the only way to alleviate it will be with programmatic cuts or tax increases. The difference for our future leaders, however, is that they will have to enact substantially deeper spending cuts or even more burdensome tax increases to try and lift the burden off their shoulders.

Middle Class Squeeze

Tea Partiers and Wall Street Occupiers both describe themselves as the “masses,” “middle-class,” or the ever-popular “99%”. Regardless of terminology, each camp understands that for regular Americans like them, the opportunity to find prosperity in this nation is dwindling.

To be sure, each movement differs regarding who is responsible for the squeeze. Tea Partiers blame an intrusive, burdensome government for over-taxing and curtailing domestic economic activity. Meanwhile, Wall Street Occupiers blame government’s favoritism of the rich and powerful, allowing them to take advantage of the masses and hoard their record profits. The truth is both groups are correct and their concerns are well justified.

To the point of the tea partiers, government size and spending has increased substantially. In 1970, total governmental spending at the federal, state, and local level was equal to 33% of GDP. In 2009, this figure was at 46%. And to the point of the Occupiers the incomes of the top 1% of Americans are indeed at an all-time high. In fact, one must look back to the Robber-Barron Era to see levels of inequality approaching today’s. In 1915 the top 1% earned roughly 18% of all income; today they earn 24%.

But certainly there has to be a good side to this unprecedented level of debt and government-sanctioned squeezing of the middle class by the richest of the rich. Perhaps these Tea Partiers and Wall Street Occupiers are just too simple too understand. The rich after all are the job creators and governmental spending ensures the vitality of public goods!

Unfortunately the past several decades have been characterized by just the opposite. The rich make their record incomes by sending overseas the jobs that were the lifeblood of our middle class. Simultaneously, governmental spending has increased, but the vitality of public goods seems to be decreasing. The U.S. continues to fall on international educational rankings, brick-and-mortar infrastructure is in massive disrepair, and numerous states cannot even adopt budgets by their constitutionally mandated timelines.

On U.S. Electoral System

The U.S. has a strong “two-party system” that all but prohibits anyone but the most extreme Democratic and Republican politicians from being elected to Congress. The precise ways in which the U.S. two-party system disenfranchises fringe parties is complicated, but rests on two pillars. Firstly, our Primary elections, mixed with gerrymandered political districts all but guarantee that only party fundamentalists are elected. Secondly, congressional districts are “winner-take-all,” meaning one candidate wins total representative power for that district.

Even if the Occupy Wall Street or Tea Party Movements formally organized themselves into a political party, they’re all but guaranteed from winning any tangible political power. This would not be the case in many other nations, particularly those with a proportional election system. Under such a system, political parties create ranked lists of individuals that they would like to send to the nation’s legislative body. An election is held, and voters choose among political parties. Parties are then allocated a number of legislative seats based on the percent of the vote they receive. Under a situation such as this, a party receiving as little as a few percent of the popular vote would still gain legislative seats.

So what happens under this system when the two parties devolve into homogenous lumps of ideologues, lacking any leadership to lead our nation out of the hole in which we’ve dug for ourselves? Can unorganized, yet highly-energized masses that have no shot as obtaining tangible political decision-making authority yield enough influence to change the status quo? This remains to be seen. They’ll have their best shot, however, by sitting down for tea to discuss their abundant commonalities and then occupying every street.