Jackson County Democrats

 By Kevin McCormick

NO TAXATION WITHout REPRESENTATION

Understanding the April 15 Tea Party Protests

By Kevin McCormick

As anyone reading this is likely already aware, thousands turned out across the country this past April 15 in a nebulous protest of – depending upon where you were and who you asked – over taxation, excessive government spending, the Obama Administration, socialism, government incursion into personal liberties and the federal deficit. Organizers deliberately invoked mythic imagery from deep in America’s historical memory , and Fox News and the non-profit organization Freedom Works promoted the protests heavily. Fox aired 107 free advertisements on the Tea Parties in the ten days leading up to the 15^th, according to the progressive media watchdog ‘Media Matters for America.’ Fox contributors still referred to the events as ‘grassroots’ and ‘spontaneous,’ leading anyone with at least a high school freshman’s command of English to wonder whether they know what those two words mean.

Accurate headcounts are difficult for any event so scattered. Math becomes a function of politics. As is always the case, supporters will highball it and detractors will probably lowball it. Fox News contributor Geraldo Rivera gave a “generous estimate” of 250,000 nationwide, pointing out the night of April 15 that the entire nationwide turnout appeared to be considerably lower than the 2006 Chicago pro-Immigration rally. For further perspective, the famous protests against the Iraq War in 2003 drew half a million in New York City alone.

Democrats and moderates – in the media, on the blogs and people with whom I’ve spoken – have generally reacted to the protests with amusement or indifference. Frankly, I confess myself, confused. It hasn’t been easy trying to pin down exactly what it is the protestors are advocating and what precisely they are protesting. I read the homemade signs that I saw in the photographs, and I listened to interviews in which vague platitudes were offered against non-existent policies (fantasies that couldn’t be more bizarrely wrong).

Dismissing out of hand such a target-rich environment is tempting, but I've honestly tried to get at what was behind the protests, and here is my opinion.  As Democrats, pragmatic facts should always supersede party affiliation.  We ought to pride ourselves on our adherence to reason and hold out side to those standards.  Therefore, let us ask: Do Tea Baggers have a legitimate point?

TAXATION AND SOCIALISMFor example: Sign in Indiana reading “Obama, Pelosi and Reid: The Axis of Taxes.” Another reading ‘Don’t Tax me, Bro.” One in Washington D.C. reading “I need a bailout to pay my taxes.” Another in D.C. reading ‘Stop Stimulating Socialism.”

Any protest based around Obama Administration taxation is puzzling. United States citizens bear the lowest tax burden in the industrialized world. It is currently lower than it was during the Bush Administration. Thanks to the Administration’s stimulus package the tea parties were partly organized to protest, every every American - including the protestors  - who makes less than $250,000 now pays less in taxes. For the sake of argument, let us  assume everyone holding those signs earned more than a quarter million dollars a year. Those people would see a four percent tax increase – from 35 to 39.6% - when the Bush Tax Cuts sunset in  2011. Yes, you read that correctly - ‘confiscatory’ 4%. Top marginal tax rates will return to where they were during the Clinton Administration, which was also the last time the United States enjoyed a balanced budget.

Closely tied to the taxation fantasy are the frequent charges that the socialists are now running the government.  This is nothing short of bizarre. Leaving aside the fact that those great Cold War socialists Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon finished their time as president with top marginal rates of 91 and 70%, respectively, let's deal with the present. “Socialism” is an odd charge when, as Think Progress blogger Matt Yglesias points out, President Obama has bent over backwards – in the face of some criticism – to avoid nationalizing the banks. The President and Treasury Secretary Geithner’s plan to include private investors in the efforts to purge the rot from the markets has come under fire from some economists – among them Nobel laureate Paul Krugman – who’d prefer they actually would be a little socialistic and use a strictly governmental plan.

BAILOUTSFor example: "When they signed the bailout bill in the fall, I was ticked. Then when I heard there was a second one (bailout) coming, I thought somebody needed to stand up and scream.” – Pennsylvania Tea Party organizer Robert Baehr

Look, nobody outside of a bailed-out company is happy about bailouts.  Absolutely nobody wants to give away money to an industry where risky behavior was one of the catalysts for the economic meltdown. Nobody wants to  “privatize profit and socialize risk”. It is vitally important to note here that the administration is choosing between options correctly labeled bad and worse. The bad option in this scenario is bailouts: the worse option is no bailouts. And, as the author Salman Rushdie pointed out recently on Bill Maher’s ‘Real Time’ debate program, nobody has a better idea.

Suppose for a moment the administration were to let the free marketeers have their way and let every business that would fail without government intervention go down. Jobs would vaporize. Previously employed people who were spending money at other businesses – keeping those businesses afloat –  would no longer spend that money, causing a ripple effect that drags down other vulnerable industries. In the case of the banks, the credit they provided would vaporize, and as credit goes, so goes the economy.

Atlantic blogger Andrew Sullivan raises a good point. At some point, somebody is going to have to pin these protestors down and force them to say what they are for, not what they are against. Against the bailouts? Fine. That is tantamount to being for a deepening of the credit crunch, unless somebody can offer an alternative plan that would not worsen the crunch while simultaneously not giving tax dollars over to failing banks . Frankly, I’m not holding my breath.

EXCESSIVE GOVERNMENT SPENDING AND THE DEFICITFor example: “I think this can only be described as generational theft.” – John McCain, this past Feb. 8. Also, a child carrying a sign at a tea party protest reading “How am I going to pay for this?”

Here lies the Tea Partiers’ strongest case. We will leave aside the unusual fact that Democratic Presidents of the modern era have made much better fiscal conservatives than Republicans. (Presidents Clinton and Carter were each reducing the Federal debt by the end of their presidencies.  The great conservative lion President Reagan increased the debt nearly by half in his first term alone, while President George W. Bush turned a record surplus into a record deficit). Where were the protests  when the Bush Administration was running up record deficits?

If we will deal strictly with the complaint that deficits and excessive government spending are both detrimental to the country’s long-term economic viability, I agree. So does the President,.  "I absolutely agree that our long-term deficit is a major problem that we have to fix," President Obama said on April 14. "But the fact is that this recovery plan represents only a tiny fraction of that long-term deficit … the key to dealing with our deficit and debt is to get a handle on out-of-control health care costs - not to stand idly by as the economy goes into free fall."

As the financially conservative British magazine The Economist and the progressive American economist Krugman have both pointed out,  a larger stimulus would have had a greater effect on the enormous American economy, and the spending should have been more front-loaded. Political   realities being what they are, it’s possible neither  strateties would have held onto the three Republican votes that got the bill passed. What’s important is that nobody has argued that the deficits are sustainable. A responsible government pays down its debt in good years, and deficit spends in extremely lean years in order to bridge the gap between private investment and spending.  So, of their three major protest complaints, exactly one makes a solid point, and it agrees with the president.

The invocation of Revolutionary imagery similarly is self-congratulatory nonsense, an exercise in willful ignorance. Colonial Americans actually were taxed without representation in the British Parliament. Modern Washington D.C. residents can plausibly make that case, but every other American citizen has representatives in Congress. As Yglesias points out, some states are taxed and overrepresented – Nebraska elects two percent of the nation’s Senate, for instance, but has substantially less than that as a percentage of national population.

The protests are sure to continue. Republicans appear to believe they can hitch their political careers a surge of ‘populist’ outrage and ride the wave upward.  Although it is the Obama Administration that has cut taxes for the middle and lower economic classes and crafted the economic recovery act that is helping states meet their budgets, rebuild infrastructure and preserve services, education and health care funding, Fox News and Freedom Works will almost certainly continue promoting a protest movement. Hopefully, at some point, an enterprising journalist will ask them what – specifically – it is they are protesting and what it is they support.