April 15th: Give the “Tea Partiers” What they Want. Revoke their tax cut. (UPDATED)
April 15, 2009
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It was still dark in the icy cold wee morning hours of November 29, 1773. A group of of Colonists disguised in Native-American garb boarded merchant ships belonging to The East India Tea Company docked in Boston Harbor with the intent of dumping their entire cargo into the bay. Though sworn to secrecy, later accounts tell us how orderly the protesters were. Damage was confined to the shipping containers loaded with tea. If they broke a lock, it was replaced. No screaming protesters with signs. No pitchforks or threats of violence. Quietly, they dumped each ships cargo into the bay and then snuck quietly away. They were still, after all, proper British Subjects and were well aware they were committing a crime.
Today is “Tax Day”, April 15th. And the “Fox Opinion Channel” (aka Fox “News”) is hyping the idea of “Conservative Tea Parties” as if they were an actual event (as opposed to a manufactured one). If you haven’t heard by now, small groups of Conservative idiots opposed to President Obama’s tax plan are planning to stage “protests” today evoking “The Boston Tea Party” of 1773… because, as any schoolboy that slept through history class can tell you, “the Boston Tea Party was when the American Colonists boarded British ships and dumped their cargo of tea overboard in protest of the taxes put on it by England.” I blame this line from School House Rock’s “No More Kings”:
Of course, that is pretty much the exact opposite of what actually happened and why the Colonists did what they did. In fact, if we carried the analogy to the bitter end, our Conservative idiots would be playing the role of the wealthy Tea Merchants, not the Colonists because the Boston Tea Party was a protest against an unfair tax break for The East India Tea Company (the “Starbucks” of their Day) so it could compete with cheap tax-free tea being smuggled into The Colonies. Only select merchants were granted permission to sell the “legal” British Tea, giving them monopolies. Between the illegally smuggled tax-free tea and the legal tax-free British tea, the price of tea was actually cheaper than ever before (the phrase “No taxation without representation” was actually a response to “The Stamp Act of 1763” ten years earlier and has very little (if anything) to do with “The Boston Tea Party”.
So what exactly are these Conservative idiots protesting? They claim they are opposed to “Obama raising taxes on hardworking Americans”… something they opposed even in the best of times, but “especially in the midst of a recession and $10Trillion dollar National Debt”. Others have already asked the obvious question, “where were these idiots back when Bush was President and racked up all this debt?”, so I’m not going to repeat their observations here. Instead, I’m asking, “what do they want and should we give it to them?”
Among this crowd of manufactured outrage, 95% of the people protesting “Obama’s Tax Increase” actually got a tax CUT under his plan, but Conservative Idiots that still believe in “Trickle Down Economics” believe that raising taxes on corporations means those businesses will simply “pass the tax increase on to consumers” and, in effect, cost them (the protesters) money. Apparently, that “free market” they insist keeps prices low (except for gasoline, health care, food, water, electricity, etc) completely breaks down if a company’s taxes increase by 3%. I debated one such Conservative idiot about a year ago who insisted a small business was more likely to lay off an employee than pay an extra $10,000 in taxes (if you’re doing the math in your head, that’s a “small business” that earned at least $433,333 in gross profit). “You’ve never run a business with employees, have you?”, I asked. When I pointed out that “firing an employee actually costs money, because your unemployment insurance goes up, and if you need to replace that worker later because consumers with more money in their pockets start buying more of your goods/services, it’ll cost the employer money to find a qualified replacement (ads, interviews, etc) and train them (loss of productivity during their retraining) all to save $10,000″, that was the last I heard from him.
So, one has to ask, “what do these protesters want?” The only way Obama can afford to give them their tax cut is by raising taxes on the top 2%. Are they willing to give up their tax cut so the top 2%… people with a net worth in excess of $5million dollars… can pay less? I doubt it. No, if you ask them, they think NO ONE should pay higher taxes. Well, if we go BACK to the Bush tax level, then their taxes will go UP. These same clueless morons are complaining about “the size of the National Debt”, yet want to cut taxes, ensuring the Debt would not only continue to grow, but explode as we spend billions to bailout the imploding Bush economy.
According to RAW Story:
As described by Ames and Levine, Santelli’s call for a “tea party” in Chicago next summer was quickly picked up by a website called ChicagoTeaParty.com and spread from there to the Drudge Report. However, the ChicagoTeaParty.com domain is not new. It was registered last summer by the producer of a right-wing radio show in Chicago and, the writers allege, is one of several tied to the anti-tax group FreedomWorks, which is among the sponsors of the current protests.
Some of the Corporate sponsors of these “spontaneous” tax protests include companies like Exxon, Philip Morris, and General Motors, giant corporations that would benefit most from a repeal of the Obama tax cut. They’ve found their “useful idiot” (what Bush was to the Neocons seeking to push their agenda), spending good money to convince Conservative Obama-hating morons that actually benefit most from the Obama tax cut, to work against their own interests. Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman criticized corporate sponsorship of these “Tea Parties” by noting: “[T]he tea parties don’t represent a spontaneous outpouring of public sentiment. They’re AstroTurf (fake grass roots) events, manufactured by the usual suspects.” Perfect metaphor. (I recommend reading the full Op/Ed.)
So I say we give these idiots the option. Go up and ask them if they are willing to give up their tax cut so that the top 2%’s can pay lower taxes. If they say the tax increase on the rich will simply be passed on to the consumer, point out that their own tax cut would more than cover any price increase businesses might try and pass on, so wouldn’t the net effect be a wash? And what ever happened to their faith in the “Free Market” to keep prices low? Show up at a protest carrying a sign that says “End NAFTA” or “Disband the WTO [World Trade Organization]” and I can assure you, they won’t know what side you’re on.
ADDENDUM: The “Tea-baggers” seem to be worried about a tax increase President Bush and the News have already assured us the Rich aren’t paying anyway:
“[An IRS report today states] 2/3 of all corporations paid NO income taxes in at least one year between 1998 and 2005.” – CBS Evening News, Aug 12, 2008
President Bush on the 2004 campaign trail rebuking Kerry’s plan to raise taxes on “the rich”:
“You know what else I think? You know what else I think when they say, tax the rich? Most rich people are able to avoid taxes, and if you can’t raise enough money from taxing the rich, guess who pays the taxes? Yes, you do. But we’re not going to let him. That’s what this campaign is about, to make sure we’ve got good tax policy.” – Albuquerque, NM, August 12, 2004
“Let me just leave you with one other thought about taxing the rich. You know how that works. A lot of the rich are able to get accountants, so they don’t — they’re able to dodge. You’ve seen it before. We’re going to tax the rich, and then they figure out how not to get taxed. So guess who ends up paying? You do.” (crowd cheers wildly at the notion that they are paying the taxes that the rich avoid.) – August 13, 2004
“You know, he says, well, we can pay for it because we’ll tax the rich. Well, we’ve heard that kind of language before. And you know what happens with this kind of tax the rich deal. That’s why they’ve got accountants and lawyers. So the rich figure out ways not to pay, and you get stuck with the tab.” – Hudson, Wisconsin, August 18, 2004
“The really right people know how to dodge taxes anyway.” – (source unknown)
Bush 2004: on how The Rich already avoid paying taxes. – :26
April 15, 2009
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Here is a website dissing the fake “roots up” teabagging parties today, comparing them to being like Astroturf, you know the fake stuff made by Monsanto Chemicals.
http://savetherich.com/
Elizabeth Hasselbeck does read her daily email parroting this morning on “The View” about this wonderful, “spontaneous, grass-roots” movement. Howver, without round-the-clock promotions by Faux News and money put into these demostrations by the likes of gazillionaires at FreedomNow (Dick Armey, Steve Forbes, Dick Stephenson who is CEO of Cancer Treatment Centers of America that gets a lot of Medicare funding!), this movement would probably be a big failure (may still be). I see the crazy Glenn Beck will be leading the “protest” in San Antonio.
Another thought from the AFL/CIO Union website:
The average CEO… the guys whom these protesters are so worried about paying 3% more in taxes… made an average 300 percent more than their average employee.
Play “Kick the CEO” at their website.
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