Lots of folks, including me, have written before about the ugly underbelly of the tea party movement - the degree to which it is animated by racial resentment and a more general antipathy toward outgroups and difference. Admittedly, this gets us into complicated territory, not least because not all Tea Partiers are alike. And that conversation becomes emotional very quickly, making it difficult to evaluate soberly the place of the movement in American politics or its aims.
What's less difficult to do is to look at the movement's own stated aims and consider their validity. Since it's tax day, I will focus on two undeniably core grievances - 1) taxes and 2) government tyranny.
There are other grievances, of course. Tea Party supporters are strongly opposed to the new health care reform legislation and think government spending is out of control (naturally, however, they have nothing to say about Pentagon spending, by far the single largest discretionary item in the Federal Budget, or about the multi-trillion dollar tax cuts of the Bush years, cuts which overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy. And they oppose precisely the kinds of health care reforms that would reduce medical costs, a major driver of our deficits). But I'll focus here on taxes and tyranny because those threads have been woven through the disparate Tea Party elements from the beginning.
1) April 15 has become a kind of May Day for the Tea Party movement, prompting protests across the country both last year and this to insist that we've been "taxed enough already."
So what do we know about how much Americans have been taxed under Obama?
...taxes are at their lowest levels in 60 years, according to William Gale, co-director of the Tax Policy Center and director of the Retirement Security Project at the Brookings Institution."The relation between what is said in the tax debate and what is true about tax policy is often quite tenuous," Gale told Hotsheet. "The rise of the Tea Party at at time when taxes are literally at their lowest in decades is really hard to understand."
It should be noted that the overwhelming beneficiaries of that sixty-year low in taxation have been the wealthy, a product of a series of tax cuts aimed at the rich over the past several decades. Given their insistence that they represent "ordinary" Americans, one might think that the Tea Party movement would have something to say about this. Nevertheless, just focusing on developments since the Tea Party movement emerged fourteen months ago, roughly 98% of Americans received a break on their Federal taxes for 2009. Some of this has been offset by increasing taxes and fees assessed by states and municipalities due to the financial crisis. But these additional state and local taxes would have been less necessary had liberal stimulus proposals fared better in the final version of the 2009 stimulus bill. That's because most Democrats wanted to provide more direct federal aid to states, precisely to help the states avoid having to levy new taxes on their citizens and were blocked by filibuster-threatening Republicans, the party to whom the vast majority of Tea Party identifiers give their support. But to be clear, Federal taxes went down for most Americans in 2009, not up.
Some critics argue that it's Obama's plans for the future that has have them so scared. But what are those plans? They consist of proposals that would raise taxes on individuals making more than $200,000 a year and married couples making more than $250,000 a year (these are the income levels at which additional taxes will be assessed both in the new health care reform package and other proposed tax increases). These enacted and proposed future increases will affect no more than 5% of earners.
So, when it comes to a tyrannical assault on American freedom in the form of new confiscatory government policies, a.k.a, higher taxes, there is no evidence to support the Tea Party's anger, unless they can explain why they only started calling for a new American Revolution in February of 2009.
2) A second clear grievance is a broader one against tyranny. As I wrote last Fall, when it comes to things that most people think of as manifestly tyrannical forms of government abuse of power - like warrantless surveillance of individuals, torture, and other clear violations of due process and people's basic rights, the Tea Party movement should have become upset at the prospect of tyranny in America long before February of 2009. And if these clear, direct forms of government abuse of power and denial of individual rights were really at the heart of Tea Party concerns, then they'd have plenty about Obama to rant at, since there is no area in which Obama has more blatantly broken his campaign promises than in this realm. Strikingly, the Tea Party, on the whole, has had very little to say about these issues.
But what about other clear forms of tyranny and abuse of power, including instances where large private corporations rip-off ordinary taxpayers while government either turns a blind eye or actively abets the abuse? Indeed, the Tea Party movement has decried Wall Street bailouts. But the movement's rejection of bailouts has not been accompanied by any policy agenda to stop such things from happening again. Where, for example, is the Tea Party insistence on significant regulatory reform to mitigate abuse by large corporations? (It's worth noting that, at least according to one of the Tea Party's top organizing vehicles, The Contract from America, neither government bailouts of banks or financial reform is among the top ten items of concern).
Surely, given the movement's call to restore our founding constitutional principles, they know that the Founding Fathers' advocacy of individual liberty, including economic liberty, did not extend to protecting the interests of large moneyed interests. The writings of the founding fathers are clear, in fact, on the threat of concentrations of wealth to the well-being of the Republic.
In fact, Thom Hartmann has made the compelling case that the original Tea Party movement, in Boston in 1773, was primarily opposed to precisely such incestuous relations between large concentrations of private wealth and indulgent government.
The equivalent of the ride of Paul Revere for the modern Tea Party movement was the Santelli rant, in February of last year, when CNBC correspondent Rick Santelli fulminated not against the degree to which mega-billion dollar entities had conspired with government to rig the system in their favor at the expense of ordinary Americans Instead, the Santelli rant was directed against a (quite modest) government program to help distressed mortgage holders and against the so-called "losers" who couldn't pay their mortgages (and inspiring the widely circulated bumper sticker "honk if I'm paying your mortgage." No such widespread bumper stickers concerning honking at banking CEOs).. Nevermind that the cost of the proposed homeowner bailout to which Santelli was reacting cost a fraction of the bailouts of the big Wall Street banks.
And why hasn't the Tea Party movement screamed bloody murder over the despicable rip-offs of Main Street like the one perpetrated against Jefferson County, Alabama and chronicled by Matt Taibbi?:
In 1996, the average monthly sewer bill for a family of four in Birmingham was only $14.71 -- but that was before the county decided to build an elaborate new sewer system with the help of out-of-state financial wizards with names like Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase. The result was a monstrous pile of borrowed money that the county used to build, in essence, the world's grandest toilet -- "the Taj Mahal of sewer-treatment plants" is how one county worker put it. What happened here in Jefferson County would turn out to be the perfect metaphor for the peculiar alchemy of modern oligarchical capitalism: A mob of corrupt local officials and morally absent financiers got together to build a giant device that converted human shit into billions of dollars of profit for Wall Street...And once the giant shit machine was built and the note on all that fancy construction started to come due, Wall Street came back to the local politicians and doubled down on the scam. They showed up in droves to help the poor, broke citizens of Jefferson County cut their toilet finance charges using a blizzard of incomprehensible swaps and refinance schemes -- schemes that only served to postpone the repayment date a year or two while sinking the county deeper into debt. In the end, every time Jefferson County so much as breathed near one of the banks, it got charged millions in fees. There was so much money to be made bilking these dizzy Southerners that banks like JP Morgan spent millions paying middlemen who bribed -- yes, that's right, bribed, criminally bribed -- the county commissioners and their buddies just to keep their business. Hell, the money was so good, JP Morgan at one point even paid Goldman Sachs $3 million just to back the fuck off, so they could have the rubes of Jefferson County to fleece all for themselves.
If Tea Partiers cared about Main Street and were serious about stopping unchecked concentrations of power from robbing Americans of their freedom and the possibility of living decent lives, they'd be all over stories like this one, especially since a version of what happened in Jefferson County has been replicated in municipalities around the country. Why has such blatant and catastrophic malfeasance by such clearly excessive concentrations of power worth nary a whisper from prominent tea party outlets, protests and leaders, while a relatively modest government effort to help distressed homeowners is the spark for a new American revolution?
The Tea Party's most strongly stated grievances do not, on the whole, appear to be based on actual identifiable developments in the world since the movement arose. Whether their grievances are a proxy for other concerns, people can decide for themselves. I've already made quite clear my suspicions in this regard (and the New York Times recent poll of supporters does show that Tea Party identifiers are about twice as likely as the average respondent to say we spend too much time worrying about Blacks). Regardless, it's hard to conclude that the movement is anything but a fraud given the vast disconnect between the movement's supposed principles and the targets of their intense anger since their inception.
Jonathan Weiler's second book, Authoritarianism and Polarization in Contemporary American Politics, co-authored with Marc Hetherington, was published in 2009 by Cambridge University Press. He blogs about politics and sports at www.jonathanweiler.com
Follow Jonathan Weiler on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jonweiler
Busses, banners abd bullshit are funded by the same interests and supplied by the same dirty tricksters that have infected the electoral process for some time now.
Dick Army, Roger Ailes, and the failures who picked McCain up off the floor and then lost when they foolishly stuck him with Alaska's faker are hearding the tea party rank and file around like cattle, and enjoying the narrative they have created.
There are many of us who were very unhappy at the spending of the Bush administration and the Republicans when they were in control of Congress. The reason for the outright anger toward the Obama administration is his spending has already dwarfed Bush's....and every other President...combined. Yeah, I get upset if my kid throws 10 bucks away, but if throws 10,000 into a lake just to watch the splash, I'm going to be even more ticked.
So taxes are the lowest in 60 years? I'll give the benefit of the doubt and say this is accurate. With the spending on the healthcare bill (if it stands as law) along with anything else he gets passed, it doesn't take a lot of philosophical thought to figure out taxes have to go up to pay for it. Plus, we can pretty much guarantee the 900 billion price tag on healthcare will balloon greatly, just as Medicare did after the initial price tag. So from here, we either raise taxes or cut spending, and I'm pretty sure cutting spending as a phrase doesn't exist in D.C.
"There are places in the world where the libertarian dream of a society where no one has to pay taxes, where state bureaucrats do not interfere in markets or control gun ownership, where there is no welfare, is realized. The greatest concentration of these is in Africa; in states like Liberia, Rwanda, and Somalia." [John Braithwaite]
I, for one, would like to personally thank these brave men and women for their valiant defense of the Great Somalian Dream we all hold so dear.
...but it was funny!
The left has LOST the argument with Middle America and the Tea Party! Maher's lack of imagination and intelligence is evident when his best argument is calling taxpaying, law abiding Americans, Nazis and Klaners. You can cling to your military hating mainstream media like Chris Matthews and Maher. You can hide in liberal Ivy League colleges and stifle the First Ammendment. And Hollywood please keep making anti American films that lose tens of millions.
In November, Flyover America will Rollover YOU!!!
Who is calling who nazis? who goes to ivy league colleges? did you read your own poll?
and who is trying to stifle the first amendment? you complaing about movies and the media and us liberals standing up for our duly elected president.
hypocrites! all of you! We can't wait till November either, it'll be so sad to see ya'll sitting at the bar crying with your guns on your hips because you were so full of yourselves, that you were so sure you would win the majority because daddy Beck told you so...what a joke and a waste of time you are!
By the way nam I am the pround parent of an army soldier...who says we hate the soldiers?
did daddy Beck tell you that too?
Their attitudes “are understandable,” he said. “For over 30 years, real incomes have stagnated or declined. This is in large part the consequence of the decision in the 1970s to financialize the economy.”
There is class resentment, he noted. “The bankers, who are primarily responsible for the crisis, are now reveling in record bonuses while official unemployment is around 10 percent and unemployment in the manufacturing sector is at Depression-era levels,” he said.
And Obama is linked to the bankers, Chomsky explained.
“The financial industry preferred Obama to McCain,” he said. “They expected to be rewarded and they were. Then Obama began to criticize greedy bankers and proposed measures to regulate them. And the punishment for this was very swift: They were going to shift their money to the Republicans. So Obama said bankers are “fine guys” and assured the business world: ‘I, like most of the American people, don't begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free-market system..’
People see that and are not happy about it.”
http://www.progressive.org/wx041210.html
I look to John Dean's book Conservatives Without Conscious. These people feel they are entitled to the leadership positions in America. The poll reveals these people are extreme conservatives, majority white, older, and mostly male. This small government crap they spout is nonsense. First of all, you can't have a growing country of over 300 mil. people and expect gov't to continue to decline in scope and size. Since the civil rights era, they have had this mantra of smaller gov't and overreach. Again, none of it makes sense, since they are the primary proponents of the christian doctrine of procreation. Most importantly, as the NYT article states, the most disastrous parts of the fiscal and budgetary problems being tax cuts for the wealthy, unpaid wars, and a bloated military budget, these people all support. It always comes down to them wanting to do away with programs that assist the poor and sick, like medicaid, medicare, and social security. They support policies that embolden the very people who have done the most harm to America, mainly greedy rich people and corporations as they all claim to be "free marketeers". There is no rationality to their greivances, nor any basis in reality. The sooner we deal with the lack of substance to the arguments of the tea party movement, the sooner we can dispense with them. As one woman did this week when confronted with facts, she said never thought about it that way, and went home.
Which, you know, is actually fine. we all have the right to protest against things we don't like because we have freedom of spech. Tea baggers have every right to simply take to the streets and protest liberals and liberal policies. I may not agree with them, but I don't have any inherent problem with them doing that either.
Just be honest about it, and don't try and fool the rest of us into thinking this is about actual concern over governmental abuse of power.
They're protesting in defense of the Constitution that explains how democracy is only democratic when Republicans win, and magically turns into tyranny anytime they don't. Duh.
You are not "mad", you are completely, totally, thankfully, SANE!
And, not only that, you have a perspicacious
overview of the situation.
You are clear, concise, logical and right on!
Thank you for stating it so very well.
People want their cake and eat it too and they don't realize you have to pay for stuff. Obama is trying to save money but the tea partiers don't get it because they are blinded by their hatred of him. By enacting healthcare reform, this will enable the heathcare industry to slow its rapid, out of control growth through mandated efficiency enacted controls. This will save money thereby saving medicare and social security. I don't think most tea partiers think in logical terms like that. Also, Bush expanded the government more than any dem has if you look at actual overall spending. Bush's tax cuts for the rich increased our nat'l. debt. because at the time he borrowed to pay for 2 wars and fund homeland security. Bush expanded the government more than the tea partiers realize.