Tea baggers like to say their group’s name stands for “Taxed Enough Already.” But as is the case with just about everything related to this corporate-funded, astroturfed protest mob phenomenon, even the name is wrong:
Amid complaints about high taxes and calls for a smaller government, Americans paid their lowest level of taxes last year since Harry Truman’s presidency, a USA TODAY analysis of federal data found.
Some conservative political movements such as the “Tea Party” have criticized federal spending as being out of control. While spending is up, taxes have fallen to exceptionally low levels.
Federal, state and local taxes — including income, property, sales and other taxes — consumed 9.2 percent of all personal income in 2009, the lowest rate since 1950, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reports. That rate is far below the historic average of 12 percent for the last half-century. The overall tax burden hit bottom in December at 8.8. percent of income before rising slightly in the first three months of 2010.
Normally, conservatives would like this part: “This tax drop has boosted consumer spending and the economy, which grew at a 3.2 percent annual rate in the first quarter. It also has contributed to the federal debt growing to $8.4 trillion,” according to USA Today.
The idea that lowering taxes increases spending among the uber-wealthy elite bolsters their voodoo fetish for trickle-down economics. Too bad for them, though, because in order to beat the drum about lower taxes boosting consumer spending, they’d first have to acknowledge the fact that Pres. Obama really has lowered, not raised, taxes, and that’s never gonna happen. Why? Because stimulus funds were used to lower taxes, and if Republican pols were to admit the stimulus has been at all a success, they’d risk being purged by the tea bagger putsch.
This is exactly what happened last weekend to soon to be ex-Sen. Bob Bennett (R-Utah), who was ousted after three terms by tea baggers (and the Club for Growth, which spent $200,000 to defeat him at the Utah state GOP convention). Bennett had an extreme right-wing voting record, but he voted for Bush’s bail out in September 2008, and he also proposed a health-care reform plan that would have forced individuals to purchase private insurance.
The BEA left out state sales taxes, payroll taxes, defered taxation through deficits, business taxes that indirectly iminge upon personal income, the inflation tax (low now, but soon to rise), regulations that amount to defacto taxes. Real fiscal burdens have risen…