The teabag rallies are over and
So here's a simple plan to make all their heads explode, based on the simple idea that they worship Ronald Reagan: instead of returning to Clinton's top marginal rate of 38%, let's return to Reagan's top marginal rate of 50%.
Better yet, let's return to Nixon's top marginal rate of 75%. Or Eisenhower's top marginal rate of 91%.
These were all popular Republican presidents. So why don't we return to good old-fashioned Republican tax rates?
What, exactly, are the protesters protesting?
The marginal tax rate rising 3% for millionaires?
By Marc Cooper April 15, 2009
The Web is buzzing with information about how to throw an anti-Obama Taxpayer Tea Party, something organizers hope will be held today from Santa Monica to South Carolina. But no need to burn up your bandwidth reading complicated instructions. Here's a simpler recipe:
Go to a hobby store. Buy a scale model of a U.N. One-World-Government Black Helicopter and a tube of glue. Toss the model kit. Sniff the entire tube of glue. You're all set for the party.
I can recall only a few outbreaks of such collective insanity as these tea parties in recent years. There was that time in the mid-1990s when a $19.95 video proving Bill Clinton was some sort of serial killer went viral. And then, a few years back, there was that chilling, televised midnight seance from the floor of the U.S. Congress aimed at reviving the long-brain-dead Terri Schiavo.
And now this. Whip out your Lipton and don your tinfoil hat and join the protest against ... against ... against what exactly?
The original Boston Tea Party was caffeinated by a very simple injustice: American Colonists refused to be taxed by a government that lacked any popular representation. That was remedied a few years later in a heroic struggle that stretched from Concord to Yorktown.
So, if you'll excuse the mixed metaphor, what's the beef behind today's protests? The Obama administration is cutting taxes for all except the very richest of Americans. Reduced withholding is already showing up in millions of paychecks.
Then again, this rash of tea parties is being organized not only by the pseudo-journalists at Fox News (with Glenn Beck, Neil Cavuto and Sean Hannity actively stoking the flames) but also by FreedomWorks, a conservative lobbying outfit headed by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey. I suppose it was Armey's constitutional if morally dubious privilege to have built an entire political career out of defending the wealthy.
But are common folks actually going to dump Earl Grey into Santa Monica Bay because they are outraged, simply infuriated, by the marginal tax rate rising 3% for millionaires?
Or maybe they'll do it for some other reason. The FreedomWorks site says the Tea Party movement began in reaction to President Obama's corporate bailouts and ensuing yawning budget deficits. These same conservatives, however, were mum when George W. Bush erased our budget surplus and put us deep in the red by drunken spending on a pointless war in Iraq and by, yes, granting massive tax rollbacks for the loaded country clubbers who fund the GOP (and Armey's FreedomWorks). Another bothersome detail: The bailouts were also initiated by Bush.
Quoting Dillon: All over the nation we just witnesses many tea parties. Tea meaning, Taxed Enough Already. In my own hometown of Paducah, Ky we witnessed one such spectacle. In the end we must ask ourselves just what did this really prove? These protests on spending and running up debt. Did all this fire and anger not spread up a little too late??
All over the country you had Republican politicians scrambling to be seen as fighting for "Conservative values". You heard them lecturing each other about "reckless spending" and "socialism". You never heard them looking at the real culprits, themselves. How many of them do you believe voted for George W. Bush twice??
In retrospect, these folks should have been protesting themselves. The situation that they are protesting did not just bring itself about, and was not caused by Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, Harry Reid or any other Democrat. One need only look back to very recent history to see the root of this evil. Just think if President Bush would have only spent as much as his Democratic predessesor Bill Clinton:
To see how different the world could have been, I gathered data from a number of sources and ran an alternative history. In that wishful place, government spending was set equal to the spending envisioned by the Congressional Budget Office in the January 2001 long-run forecast, plus the spending for the war in Iraq and to fight terrorism. This simulation assumes that the war would have happened in spite of Bush's spending promise, and wouldn't have induced him to seek cuts elsewhere.
Think of it this way. If we now had the lower spending levels that Bush inherited, we could extend his tax cuts, repeal the alternative minimum tax, enact the current stimulus package, and still have a 10-year budget surplus of $1.9 trillion. And, remember, that allows spending to be adjusted up for the Iraq war and the war against terrorists.