A Tea Party to Protest Tax Increases on the Rich?

Today, Republicans have found an issues that solidifies their conservative values. Across the nation tea parties are being held to protest a tax increase on the rich.

Led by Fox News, these Republicans are upset over Barack Obama's statements that he is going to raise taxes on the people that make over $250,000 a year to the same levels they were under in 1990's. (If I remember correctly, the economy did pretty darn well under Bill Clinton in the 90's.)

There are plans for a tea party in Des Moines today at the State Capital Building.

From Open Left...

They will provide a staged, corporate lobbyist-sponsored moment for Republicans and Fox News personalities to amplify their specious objections to President Obama's tax increase for the rich, while furthering their own right-wing conspiratorial claims about liberal values.

This story at MyDD tells about a gallup poll that shows Americans are pretty split on the tax issue and a majority believe the rich (those making over $250,000 a year) should be paying a little more...

A new Gallup Poll finds 48% of Americans saying the amount of federal income taxes they pay is "about right," with 46% saying "too high" -- one of the most positive assessments Gallup has measured since 1956. Typically, a majority of Americans say their taxes are too high, and relatively few say their taxes are too low. [...]

The slightly more positive view this year may reflect a public response to President Barack Obama's economic stimulus and budget plans. He has promised not to raise taxes on Americans making less than $250,000, while cutting taxes for lower- and middle-income Americans. The latter has already begun, as the government has reduced the withholding amount for federal income taxes from middle- and lower-income American workers' paychecks.

Which pretty much begs the question: what exactly are the teabaggers protesting, exactly, the largest middle class tax cut in history? The irony (and tragedy) is that a lot of these tea bag parties are going to entail middle class folks throwing tea into some body of water presumably (?) in protest of a slight increase in taxes on only the wealthiest Americans, who are precisely the ones, through their perches at FoxNews and on talk radio, who are riling people up to go to the protests in the first place.

I think the larger point about where the country is on this issue is that there has been a shift in attitudes toward taxes over the past few years thanks largely to Bush. Let's face it, during the Bush years, there was a direct correlation between taxes being cut and services being cut; between the amount people were paying to the government and the competence and effectiveness of that government. These teabaggers can whine all day about the big bad government but the truth is people are willing to pay for good government service. The idea that government spending or raising taxes on the rich while cutting taxes on everyone else somehow limits freedoms is, as most views the rightwing holds, a radical minority view.

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