Sam Adams is rolling in his grave

[one...two...tree 2,762]

Sam Adams is rolling in his grave, because the "Tea Parties" scheduled for this month to protest taxes and the public structures taxes support are a gross distortion of history.

The real Boston Tea Party was a protest not against taxation but against a tax cut for a multinational corporation of the day. In that famous event leading up to the American Revolution, colonists dumped British tea into Boston Harbor in protest against the Tea Act of 1773, which gave a tax break to the British East India Company. As noted by the Boston Tea Party Historical Society, the tax break was an effort by the British Crown to help the East India Company establish a tea monopoly in the American colonies. Yet the present-day "Tea Parties" aren't a protest against tax breaks for corporations but instead a rant against taxation and government spending.

Sam Adams and the other American patriots might be tempted to tar and feather today's political operatives who have transformed a story of the people standing up to a government that caters to powerful corporate interests into a message that serves the interest of the well connected and well heeled. (See this 1999 Malcolm Gladwell article about how conservatives misrepresent the Boston Tea Party (PDF))

The message of these political operatives ignores how tax-supported public structures create economic opportunity. Good schools, roads and libraries, access to health care and courthouses — these are the basic building blocks of strong communities and a healthy economy.

The planned protests are also blind as to who has benefited from the drive to cut taxes over the past few decades.

As corporations and wealthy individuals have shed their tax responsibilities, working families and small businesses have been forced to pick up the slack,

While profitable corporations in the mid-1970s paid 18.5 percent of all Oregon income taxes, their share is projected to be just 6 percent during the 2009-11 biennium. Contrary to the claims of the Tea Party protest organizers, levels of spending and taxes in Oregon have not been going up.

You also won't hear the protesters acknowledge that as a share of income, the wealthiest Oregonians pay the lowest amount of taxes (state and local combined) of any income group (PDF).

Working families have reason to be upset, but they would be better off protesting against tax breaks and loopholes that favor the powerful and in favor of a more just tax structure. That's what the original Sam Adams was doing.

http://www.blueorego...g-in-his-grave/