AMERICA'S NEW TEA PARTY - April 27, 2009

Within America, the most iconic example of protest against tyranny remains the Boston Tea Party. On December 16, 1773, after officials in Boston refused to return three shiploads of taxed tea to Britain, a group of colonists boarded the ships and destroyed the tea by throwing it into Boston Harbor. The incident spurred the colonies into action and laid the groundwork for the American Revolution. 

On April 15th, the dreaded date by which Americans file their income taxes, thousands of protests erupted across the country in what were called “Tax Day Tea Parties.” Ordinary citizens in an extraordinary outburst of anger advocated for the return of the free-market system and a clamp-down on government spending.  Provoked by the policies of both the current and previous Administrations this citizen movement rallied for the people to once again be heard in Washington.

While critics have painted demonstrators in broad conservative strokes, the movement is analogous with neither party – its message most resembling the Libertarian principles of small government, private property, and individual liberty. While libertarians are a diverse group of people with both Republican and Democratic philosophical starting points, they share a defining belief: that everyone should be free to do as they choose, so long as they don't infringe upon the equal freedom of others.

To protestors, the removal of personal and economic liberty directly threatens the abundance, peace and security of this nation. Recent policy decisions have jeopardized these liberties through increased taxation, indebtedness, and bureaucracy. Consider these points:

• There have been multiple rounds of bank/insurance bailouts since July 2008, each on increasingly worse terms for the taxpayer.   Bush engineered the early bailouts for Citigroup and Bank of America, and they were bad, but not nearly as awful as Obama's Citigroup bailout, where government-owned preferred stock was converted to common stock at higher than market price. The convertible preferred bank shares that the Treasury will buy under the latest plan will give all the financial rewards to the banks, not to the taxpayer.

• President Bush led the country into the Iraq War, increased defense spending, and implemented troop surges that made him terribly unpopular both at home and abroad. Now President Obama is initiating a troop surge of his own in Afghanistan and plans to increase defense spending by 2% in the next fiscal year for a total of 9% more than we spent in 2008 according to Cindy Williams, a defense scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and former assistant director of the Congressional Budget Office.

• Pork barrel spending – or the practice of giving taxpayer handouts to congressmen for pet projects back home – surged under President Bush. As a candidate, President Obama said he would “slash earmarks by more than half,” but instead signed a budget bill laden with over 8,750 earmarks at a cost of $7.7 billion according to Taxpayers for Common Sense.

• The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has concluded that the national debt will grow by $9.3 trillion between 2010 and 2019 under Obama's stimulus plan. According to the CBO, the debt held by the public will rise, from 41% of gross domestic product (GDP) under Bush in 2008 to 57% in 2009 under Obama, and then to 82 percent of GDP by 2019.

Both President Obama and Congress have tried to seduce Americans into believing that they cannot live without increased governmental paternalism, but they have forgotten that Americans believe that they are the masters of their own fate. Our individualism drives the ingenuity that makes this nation great. The events on April 15th are the product of the federal government infringing on the personal and economic liberties of Americans who have plead for a stop to irresponsible bailouts, to a tripling of the national debt, and to pork barrel politics.

Many observers of the Tea Parties were confused by the demonstrations, given the fact that President Obama has not increased income taxes – except on tobacco, which does not impact the majority of Americans. But pragmatists throughout the country understand that the mushrooming effect of federal outlays is a future tax increase in the making. “Even the most basic inspection of the IRS income tax statistics shows that raising taxes on the salaries, dividends and capital gains of those making more than $250,000 can't possibly raise enough revenue to fund Mr. Obama's new spending ambitions,” (The Wall Street Journal, The 2% Illusion, February 27, 2009).

Aside from taxation, skepticism concerning the government’s ability to effectively grapple with the ballooning deficit also played a key role in the Tea Party rallies. To his credit, President Obama has promised to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term. However, his ability to implement this goal without raising taxes on the middle class is dubious at best. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) states that the current deficit is $672 billion – a staggering 46% more than the deficit under Bush in 2008 – and in 2010 the deficit will begin an upward spike, reaching $1 trillion by 2018.

President Obama’s economic decisions have been far left of where the country is trending. According to The New York Times columnist David Brooks, “The crisis has not sent Americans running to government for relief. Nor has it led to a populist surge in anti-business sentiment. In a recent Gallup poll, 55 percent of Americans said that big government is the biggest threat to the country. Only 32 percent said big business” (The New York Times, Yanks in Crisis, April 24, 2009).  These numbers prove that despite promises by the federal government that borrowing and spending will improve the economic crisis, most Americans genuinely agree with the premise underlying the Tea Party demonstrations on April 15th: “Give me liberty: not debt!”

Stephanie Kimball

----------------------
Author of the article holds B.A. degree in Political Science from the University of California Davis. For the last 9 years she has been working as a Legislative Director for several Republican Assembly members in the State of California.
----------------------