By Cliff Cawthon & Irene Morrison

On April 16th and 18th in Buffalo and across the nation, libertarians and conservatives engaged in some very disingenuous “Tea Parties”. The gatherings supposedly alluded to the 1773 Boston Tea Party which revolted against taxation by the British without representation in the British government. Today’s Tea Parties were backed by right-wing political and corporate support—many of the people who got us into this current financial mess—making them fall flat as a cute concept but a poor history lesson.  

Americans are obsessed with their taxes. There seems to be so little understanding of the fact that the US has one of the lowest rates of taxation in the world. Or that taxes pave our streets, pay for our teachers, support us when we are too old to work, and so many other things. The idea that too many people abuse “the system” of social safety nets and therefore there should be less support for them is—like the Tea Parties—a case of misplaced priorities. Regulation would solve the problem of abuse of the system; less taxes would just make already stumbling programs worse off.

If we really want our taxes lowered, there is a great solution: stop funding the military-industrial complex that has been a major factor in our current economic recession. Almost 50% of our income taxes are spent on our military. Why weren’t these Tea Parties weren’t being thrown when Bush announced we would be going into two illegal and unjust wars that would lead to out-of-control national debt?

In most cases these Lipton-lobbing libertarians (who in a great twist of irony probably paid sales tax on the tea they used) and conservatives are on the fringe of a political wasteland. Now given the demagoguery of Governors Perry, Palin and the Virginia Rep. Eric Kantor, they may form the backbone of our national regression. They are simply trying to re-build the base for their electoral and financial success.

This free-market fundamentalism has and will continue to retard progress. Our response to their Astroturf movement is expressed in the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes: “Tax is the price we pay for a civilized society.” The focus should be on spending taxes properly and ensuring that they are justly levied accodring to one’s wealth; if anything we could benefit fromtax levels closer to those of many countries in Europe. Fortunately it seems the tea parties are over, at least for now.