The Left's Tea Party Talking Points Dissected
ByWe’ve been tracking the organized Left’s talking points regarding the tea party movement for some time. The first three canned and mass-xeroxed arguments were:
(1) Where were these people during the last 8 years when George Bush and a Republican Congress were approving budget deficits? The tea parties are just Republican rallies and political party advertisements.
(2) What tax increases are they complaining about? Obama’s stimulus package contains hundreds of millions of dollars in tax cuts for business. Clearly, they aren’t angry about taxes, they’re just angry because they are Republicans and they lost.
(3) The tea parties shouldn’t be taken seriously as indicative of popular unrest because they aren’t really grassroots events, but instead something consultants call “astro-turf.”
The short answer to each of these, of course, is that the tea parties are simply not about party politics. The longer answers follow:
(1) Many if not most tea party protestors were concerned about deficit-spending and bailouts under W. and the Republican Congress, but the outrage has come in recent months after reports of nationalized banks, trillion-dollar spending packages, and more bailouts. The problem has recently changed both in character and degree — and the change certainly warrants protests.
(2) Obama’s tax cuts don’t change two realities of concern to protesters. First, people directly or indirectly pay approximately 65-70% of every dollar they spend to the government if you consider both that 25% or more of their income must be paid to federal income taxes and that around 40% of each dollar they spend on goods and services is the result of business passing on the costs of federal and state tax and regulatory burdens to consumers. Many taxpayers will also be on the hook for taxes to fund social security and other entitlement programs, state income taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, even double-taxation after they’ve received gains on income invested. Second, massive spending will have to paid for either through direct taxation or through inflation, a form of indirect taxation. In many ways, indirect taxation through inflation is even worse than direct taxation because it requires people to alter the way they spend or invest what little money is left to their discretion in hopes of preserving some of its rapidly falling value. Considering this, it is not hard to understand why taxpayer’s are frustrated and willing to protest even after Obama’s stimulus package included targeted tax cuts.
(3) This is an unfair effort to dismiss the undeniable fact that the vast majority of tea party organizers and protesters really are just concerned citizens. We are frequently seeing the Left-wing blogosphere stretch like a herd of chinese acrobats in order to tie tea parties to groups or organizations that have high negatives for their viewers. Daily Kos, for instance, has been claiming that FoxNews is “sponsoring” the tea party movement and implying that they have secretly been underwriting the movement or organizing it.
There are, however, two newer and less frequently used talking points that are surfacing despite being offensive and absurd.
The first is that the tea parties should be dismissed because ”teabagging” is sexual jargon and only stupid religious nuts would name a protest in a way that can be mocked in such a way. We’ve never used the term “teabagging” or “teabaggers,” and we don’t think this argument even merits a response. We think the argument might reveal something about the mindset and character of the people making it, but we don’t think we need to go there.
The second new argument is that the tax day tea parties fail because organizers are not handing out free tax consultation to people who need help complying with federal tax laws. We laughed a bit when we read MiketheLiberal commenting on DailyKos: “Are they planning on giving free tax advice to people who haven’t yet filed their taxes? I didn’t think so.” Is everything about a handout with these people?
