“I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.” — Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.
I couldn’t just let this wonderful day pass by without a few choice words about the Tea Parties going on today. I’ve been watching the interwebs/twittersphere with amusment at all the teabagging jokes going around today. Also I’m amused at all the people taking this shit seriously.
I mean come on Wonkette is having field day with this!
I was watching the local Twitter results today and noticed a few people talking about attending the local tea parties around Newport News Town Center and Virginia Beach. I was half tempted to drive on down there during my lunch break to check it out and snap some photos. I’m sure it would have been fun.
It’s highly amusing to witness the the right wing hysteria that has accompanied Obama’s few months in office. These are the same people that stood by silently for 8 years while W ran this country into the ground, and now Obama’s been ni the White House for 10 weeks and they’re going apeshit. Here’s a little fact check for you: Obama’s proposed tax rate for the wealthiest Americans will still be lower than what it was when Regean was president! Here’s a chart in case you’re slow:
And as ProgressNotCongress notes, the funniest thing is that it is the middle class out here acting outraged at the bidding of the superwealthy, Fox News, and the GOP. They’ve let 8 years of war, no-bid contracts, and destruction of science, environmental and constitutional rights go by without a squawk and have gotten riled up at a massive liberal spending plan for education, healthcare and energy. Of course there’s the bank bailouts to be mad about, and these people probably think TARP’s all Obama’s fault as well. While I’m not a huge fan of the bailouts per se, the President believes that one dollar given to the banks get’s spent 7 times over in the larger economy.
My high school government teacher, Mr. Tenny, used to have a sign up in his class that said “The richest 10% of the population controls 90% of the wealth.” These same people are now inflamed because they pay 72.4% of the tax revenues. Outraged that those making less than $44K a year only pay a collective 3.3% of the total tax burden each year, they go out of their way to hide their income in tax shelters, charitable deductions, and spend hundreds of millions on their lobbyists to get the tax rules changed to benefit them, their bank accounts, and the corporations that they work for.
What’s sad is the sheer number of middle Americans that have gotten swept up in this hysteria. We saw the beginnings of it during the election cycle as people bought into the Obama-is-a-secret-Muslim propoganda that still survives to this day. The right wing hype machine stirs up a little outrage and the 43% of the population that watches Fox News gets whipped into a rabid frenzy. I understand that most of these people are acting in their self-interest, I feel that it is the result of a the deluded propoganda that they have been exposed to and that they are actually serving the best interests of the right wing elites.
To give you a similar example from (not-so) recent American history, look to the situation that existed in the runup before the Civil War. The slaveowners in power realized that if the lower class were to side with the slaves, it would be the catalyst for a massive revolt and uprising against the slaveowners and status quo. Accordingly, institutionalized racism was used to stir up the us vs. them mentality and discourage white working classes from socializing and empathizing with the slaves. What does that have to do with today’s events? It is analogous to the division of the middle class against the impoverished and lower income populations of this country and the alignment of them with the upper class.
The original Boston Tea Party was a protest over taxation without representation. Today’s tea party seems to be just about taxation. While a lot of the people that turned out today are protesting against sincerely held beliefs and outrage over the bailouts, I suspect that the real agenda is to align the upper middle class with the super-rich and preventing centrist, middle-of-the-road America from pursuing a more progressive, liberal agenda that favors the disenfranchised.
Reality is purported to have a liberal bias. Today’s teabaggers are so far out of this plane of existence, deluded and frightened that America is going to turn into a welfare state where everyone who works for a living has to pay rent for those to lazy to go out and get a job. What would they instead advocate for, a me-first apocalypse wasteland of militias holed up in compounds waiting for the End of Days while the rest of the world burns?
Last month some of these people were complaining that Obama’s tax stimulus amounted to an extra $13 dollars a week or so. Now people are complaining that Obama will have to raise their taxes down the road by a similar amount to pay for the stimulus that was just passed. What they don’t understand is that they’re leading the call of people for whom a change in the tax rate means millions of dollars. As someone who just paid over two month’s salary on last years taxes I can understand a bit of the outrage that the teabaggers are feeling. I feel that a lot of it has been drummed up by disinformation and propaganda, and unfounded fears of America turning into a European Socialist state.
There has been an imbalance in American society toward wealthy individuals and corporations over the past few years, a preference toward wealth building over quality of life and basic government services. One of Obama’s main strengths is his activist (read radical) and community organizing skills. He showed exactly how to rally a class of disenfranchised people toward a common cause, and he has used that power to pass revolutionary spending plans in education, healthcare and energy infrastructure. Conservatives hate this, and so they have used their own community organizing to create their own movement.
Too bad it looks pathetic.
