Tax Day ‘Tea Parties’ Show Intolerance More Than Patriotism

By: Tonyaa Weathersbee

Wouldn’t you know it?

Wouldn’t you know that right about the time a black man is elected to lead the country, a whole lot of white people would want to stop paying the money it takes to run it?

That they’d want to pick up their toys, er, taxes, and go home?

That is, after all, really what’s eating most of the people who plan to turn out for one of the many “Tax Day tea parties” that are being held in cities around the country today.

Buoyed by a number of right-wing billionaires who are none too happy with President Barack Obama’s plan to make them pay more taxes, as well as the hot air coming from Fox News’ blowhards, thousands are expected to toss out little tea bags to tell Congress and Obama that they don’t like his budget; that the trillions he is poised to spend will shackle future generations with too much debt.

Now, reasonable people can disagree about where Obama’s budget might lead. But the thing that has these tea partiers in a tizzy have less to do with how much Obama plans to spend – and more to do with what he plans to spend it on.

And it seems they’d rather spend money invading other countries than to uplift their own.

A guy named Tim, for example, told the Ann Arbor News in Michigan that he hadn’t been politically active in years, but that he decided to get involved because of Obama’s big-spending, big-government agenda – and that he believed the country was headed toward a “nanny state.”

Think about that for a minute.

For the past six years, George W. Bush wasted trillions of dollars in Iraq – an unnecessary war generated by neo-con spin and exploitation of fears – on private contractors and other assorted parasites. He also did the fiscally irresponsible thing of cutting taxes while waging war – and caused the surplus left by his predecessor, Bill Clinton, to evaporate.

If there was any time for this Tim guy and the rest of tea partiers to protest irresponsible government spending, it was five or six years ago.

If they were genuinely concerned about wasteful government spending - or, as they’re now crying, “taxation without representation” - they would have been protesting the corporate welfare that subsidizes wealthy companies - some of which are probably sponsoring these tea parties - and costs taxpayers around $900 billion a year.

None of that pushed them to the tea party boiling point. Obama, however, did.

And the fact that they’re protesting now – as Obama is faced with having to clean up that steamy pile of fiscal mess left by the last administration – tells me their outrage has less to do with the policies that are coming from the White House and more to do with who is living there.

And, in a way, it’s rather sad.

Tax Day ‘Tea Parties’ Show Intolerance More Than Patriotism....