Tea Party person fighting with a bank?

Tea Party aligned Georgia Rep. Tom Graves (R), who castigates Washington for fiscal irresponsibility, reached an out of court settlement Wednesday after he was sued for defaulting on a $2.2 million loan — which his attorney argued is the bank's fault for lending him the money in the first place.

Graves and his business partner Chip Rogers — who is the state Senate's Republican majority leader — took out a $2.2 million loan from the Bartow County Bank in 2007 to buy and renovate a local motel. The project soon went belly-up.

All of this only makes sense if the contradiction at the core of popular American economic thinking is appreciated: Noise is only made about public debt, and little is made about private debt—which is much, much, much larger than anything you can imagine, crashed the economy in 2008, and caused a dramatic increase in government debt.