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| Teabagging Protests | ||||
Matt Taibbi has an interesting (and funny) article about the TEA party protesters.
So yeah, government waste sucks, it’s rampant at every level, and taxes are a vicious racket, and everyone should be pissed off . What’s hilarious about the teabaggers, though, is how they never squawk about waste until the spending actually has a chance of benefiting them. You will never hear of a teabagger crying about OPIC giving $50 million in free insurance to some mining company so that they can dig for silver in rural Bolivia. You won’t hear of a teabagger protesting the $2.5 billion in Ex-Im loans we gave to GE through the early part of this decade, even as GE was moving nearly a hundred thousand jobs overseas over the course of ten years. And Michelle Malkin’s readers didn’t seem to mind giving IBM millions in Ex-IM and ATP loans at the same time it was giving its former CEO, Lou Gerstner, $260 million in stock options.
In other words teabaggers don’t mind paying taxes to fund the salaries of Bolivian miners, Lou Gerstner’s stock options, deliveries of “sailboat fuel,” the Hermes scarves on Sandy Weill’s jet pillows, or even the export of their own goddamn jobs. But they do hate it when someone tries to re-asphalt their roads, or help bail their slob neighbor out of foreclosure. And God forbid someone propose a health care program, or increased financial aid for college. Hell, that’s like offering to share your turkey with the other Pilgrims! That’s not what America is all about! America is every Pilgrim for himself, dammit! Raise your own motherfucking turkey!
As to what the teabaggers were supposedly protesting--after all this was a Taxed Enough Already (TEA) protest--the Citizens for Tax Justice had this (PDF file) to say.
A recent Gallup poll found that 61 percent of respondents felt that the federal income tax they will have to pay this year is “fair.” When asked about the specific amount of federal income taxes they pay, just over half felt they pay the right amount or too little. Forty-eight percent of respondents thought that the amount of federal income tax they pay is “about right.” That’s the highest percentage of people who responded that way since 1956. (Another three percent thought they the paid too little.)
Fewer than half of those polled, 46 percent, said they thought their federal income taxes are “too high.” It appears, however, that some of these respondents are basing their answers on the right-wing, anti-tax propaganda they’ve heard rather than their own income tax liability. In particular, 39 percent of respondents with incomes below $30,000 said that they thought the federal income taxes they pay are “too high.” This is remarkable, because only 32 percent of taxpayers in this income group will pay any federal income tax at all on their 2008 income.
Taxpayers with adjusted gross incomes below $30,000 represent almost half (46 percent) of the total number of taxpayers for tax year 2008. With a small amount of public education about the (admittedly complicated) tax system, displeasure with the federal income tax among this part of the population could drop significantly.
It appears some people steep the teabag too long until the taste is bitter.
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