Tea For Who?

Talk radio and hysterical bloggers from the extreme right wing of the political landscape are urging all tax haters to come together on April 15, 2009 for a big Tea Party. Of course, April 15 is the annual deadline date for filing your income taxes and what better way to celebrate unemployment or underemployment than hanging with your outraged pals and rail against America's outrageous tax burden.

But wait. What if we're not really that heavily taxed when compared to most other industrialized nations? Bruce Bartlett from Forbes Magazine has an excellent column on this very subject. Check the link to get the facts. I can briefly state from the information Mr. Bartlett provides is that this year will mark the lowest tax revenue intake as a percentage of our Gross Domestic Product since 1950. I can also say only four countries from the 30 nations who are partnered in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development have a lower tax rate than the good old USA, which clocks in near the bottom with a 28% overall tax rate. The countries listed below the USA are Japan, which is one-tenth of one percentage point lower than our rate here in America, Korea, Turkey and Mexico. Mexico, is at the bottom with a twenty percent tax rate, or they could be listed first in the hearts of tea party enthusiasts everywhere.

Now prospective tea party attendees, what country today not in the heart of Africa undergoing civil war or being occupied by US forces, would you probably rate as the unsafest place to be in the world? Yo voto para Mexico. Could getting very little in tax revenues lead to drug lords and organized crime ruling the country? You decide.

I will say that these tea party events are not really about paying taxes, but about how taxes are spent. Back in February, after the televised meltdown by an investment trader that got so much play on the Daily Show and CNBC, Patric Jonsson wrote a brief piece for the Christian Science Monitor. Click the link if you want to read his original take on the tax protests. Here is a pertinent excerpt from my point of view:

- "It’s worth remembering that the rise of the New Right and the Christian Right, one after the other, were both spurred by tax issues, the whole idea of paying for things they don’t believe in,” says sociologist Eugenia Deerman at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston who studies conservative social movements.-

So this is really about a group of folks who found out in November the world had moved on without them. These people realized that tax money was going to go for things like birth control, medical privacy, health coverage for all, the environment and public education (which still strongly resists religious dogma as part of the curriculum) and hence the protest. Certainly there are plenty of other issues (gay rights, regulation of industry, undocumented workers) these protesters take exception to that government finds itself in the middle of these days as we try to set a different course from the Republican dominated past three decades.

This really isn't about taxes, but no more taxes has always played well to the bamboozled members of the self righteous. Even now with so many studies available to document how many have lost so much while so few benefited so mightily from the Republican led tax cuts enacted over the last 28 years a Tea Party resonates with folks feeding at the right wing talk radio trough.

On tax day I guess we'll see how the irresistible forces of change meet the immovable objects of no. For me I'll be putting on a Tea For One.

For the believers, the pagans and the lost but found- Happy Easter!