Don’t know if any of you have heard this before, but it would appear that the Tea Party really has a problem with taxes. In fact they base their whole existence on what they believed was the reason for the Boston Tea Party and the Patriotic Demonstration against English taxation by throwing barrels of tea into Boston Harbor. Problem is that according to someone who was there and wrote about it, the issue was against a corporate tax cut for the East India Company that harmed local business as Thom Hartmann brilliantly educates us on. Here is the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UiLZk2TE8k

But that’s okay, it doesn’t matter because it is a common misconception of most Americans what the original Tea Party was about, but there’s no harm in knowing the truth, unless your very existence depends on a lie. But no matter, the Tea Party vehemently demand that all taxes be reduced, if not eliminated because they are too high. In fact, GOP Chairman Reince Priebus has gone so far recently as to say his fear of an Obama re-election is that he would have to pay his taxes. Forget that under the current president, current Federal and FICA taxes are at their lowest rates in over 60 years. The only taxes that have gone up have been some state and local taxes to continue to fund services once subsidized by the Federal government by funds now cut off by a Tea Party Republican House in Congress.

So the Tea Party doesn’t want to pay taxes, they are opposed to them, they are too high, yet all of the Tea Party membership enjoy government services provided by Federal, State, County and Municipal taxation. Services like:

Clean water standards, monitoring of pharmaceuticals, safe food supply, clean air standards, interstate highway system, roads, sidewalks, public transportation, police, fire fighters, emts, social security, Medicare, Medicaid, United States Military, Veteran services, functioning court system, jails, prisons, public schools, community colleges, state universities, power grid, public airwaves, parks, etc, etc.

Now many in the Tea Party would say, in fact do say, that most of these services can and should be privatized. Well what would be the unintended consequences of that? Government operation of these service do not incorporate a profit margin that private industries demand for their shareholders.

A good example is Medicare which only has 3% of its budget geared towards administering of services, compared to private insurance which prior to a 20% limit imposed by the Affordable Care Act, had 35% to 40% administration costs, i.e. Bonuses to the CEOs, Board and profits to the shareholders. Another example has been a recent phenomena where Fire Stations have privatized and fires breaking out at homes that haven’t paid the dues have been left to burn.

So, government with the taxes imposed still provide many services that Tea Party folks would sorely miss if they were gone, or could find themselves unable to afford if they were privatized. By working to not pay their fair share of taxes for government to provide these services, Tea Party folks are quite simply dining and dashing.

To get back to the Thom Hartmann link at the top of this rant, one reason I included it was to point out the irony involving the Tea Party and their fight against unfair taxation memorialized by the myth of the Boston Tea Party. The irony is that the Tea Party may have begun as a grassroots movement begun under Bush, to complain about his spending, but has been with the infusion of Corporate Dollars from David and George Koch and other billionaires, melded into a political force. The rank and file Tea Party folks have little idea they are actually working for the very type of Corporation that the true Boston Tea Party folks were actually protesting about.

Exercise true personal responsibility, pay your bills for services rendered, pay your taxes.