I don’t understand the Tea Party. I’ll admit that I’ve spent the past day trying to research what they want on the Internet, and the only thing I can come up with is they just don’t want to pay taxes. I can understand the frustration. I hate when I go to Publix to buy a newspaper and I have to pay an extra 6 or 7 cents in sales tax. But that’s mostly because I just don’t feel like getting that much change.
There are a few specific things about the Tea Party movement I can’t wrap my head around — one being the question of why all this is happening now. There’s utter hatred of President Obama from conservatives in the U.S., and I feel like the Tea Party movement is simply the manifestation of such hatred. This is evidenced by the fact that while the Republican government under President George W. Bush took our taxes and spent them on two imbecilic (at best) and illegal (at worst) wars, there were no Tea Party protests. Tea Party members maintain they weren’t happy with government spending under the Republicans, but they didn’t protest. Not until there was a Democratic president.
Another thing I don’t understand is what the Tea Partiers propose we should have done to get out of the recession – other than the opposite of what the federal government did. Instead of letting the banking industry crumble, which would lead to further economic turmoil, the government (Democrats and Republicans) decided to do whatever it could to bring the country back from the brink of a second depression. The same thing happened with the auto industry.
I understand the frustrations surrounding these two decisions because they frustrated me, as well, but I can also see why the government did what it did. When top economic advisers are telling the leaders of the country to do something to help jump-start the economy, we should follow their advice and do whatever we can. However, there should be stipulations put in place to prevent such an event from happening again. Looking at the situation from the outside, it seems the government actually handled itself very well because the economy is well on its way to recovery.
This brings me to the issue of taxes. Tea Partiers don’t want to pay taxes, or at least they don’t want to pay higher taxes. The most baffling thing, to me, is that President Obama has actually cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans since he’s been in office. Although it’s not much, Americans have been taxed less and have received money back from the government. It seems to me the time for these anti-tax rallies would have been during Bush’s presidency, when taxes were cut for the wealthy but stayed relatively the same for the middle and lower classes. At least the money the government collects from its people is being spent on things inside the country now, since we will soon be out of Iraq and Afghanistan for good, and we won’t have to spend more money over there.
Finally, I see some inherent wrongs with the Tea Party as a whole. I assume the Tea Party patriots have to travel to their conventions and rallies by driving. Do they advocate the use of taxes to repair the roads they use? How about the public education system? Should it be privatized, forcing families to pay through the nose for elementary and high schools? Are all government programs bad or just the ones that are outside your district, or ones Democrats support? And how about the Tea Party convention this week? Would the $549 per person not be better spent helping out someone in Haiti or helping out a lower-income family? But I better watch myself. My want to help the downtrodden is sounding pretty Socialist right about now.
The original Tea Party was an act of frustration against the British government for taxing the colonies without allowing them to represent themselves in Parliament. The current Tea Party just seems to be an act of frustration against the Democrat-controlled American government.
