Taxes, Taxophobia, Taxidermy

Just to get it right out there, I'm seldom in the neighborhood of exuberant around April 15. It's an ignominious chore, this "doing" of the taxes. Yes, there are other, more frequent and routine ignos in this life, ever-so-many. But the IRS process is needlessly, absurdly, complex unless you are doing the most simple filing - or can rationalize having a professional do it for you. And with every passing year it gives more feeling of being this way largely to shake down the little guy (or Paul, as the case may be).

For the record, Exxon, among many large corporate others, reportedly paid no income tax at all this year..

But, stepping back, I can certainly relate to this post from a re-constructed tax-o-phobe, gleefully titled "Suck It, Tea Party, I Love Tax Day." It should be noted that the author has young children and is so brazen as to both care about their future and acknowledge the societal ("socialism!") features that government provides on behalf of children (e.g., clean water, safe food, public education, parks, playgrounds, roads, etc.). What a concept, eh? Such a contrast to the "Tea Party" folks, that motley crew. At the top, overpaid-and-rewarded Wall Street gamblers-with-the-funds-of-others and Health Care oligarchs, among others, many with multi-million dollar salaries and mega-bonuses even when their corporations were having to be bailed out by your taxes. At the bottom, the disenfranchised who have lost jobs and any hope mostly because of the recklessness of the former but know no better than to desperately revert to racism, seek scapegoats, and otherwise play stooge. What a conjunction - as others have said, not unlike the improbable conjoinings in the natal stages of Nazi Germany.

I can't do this post justice with limited excerpting - you need the whole thing:

Like a lot of Americans, I've spent a small but deeply unfortunate fraction of my recent life puzzling over the Tea Party's Tax Day Extravaganza of Irrational Grievance, or whatever they're calling it.

As a longtime resident of the Boston area, it's especially galling to see a bunch of angry old white people -- many of whom, we learned recently, are on the federal dole -- behave as if their democratically elected officials are foreign despots. It would probably behoove the Fourth Estate to draw a thick line between genuine victims of colonialism and sore losers.

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But my financial affairs have become more involved recently, for two reasons. First, somewhat improbably, I've started to earn more money. For another, in 2006 I got married and had a child, roughly in that order.

Strangely -- and it does feel genuinely strange to me -- these momentous events have totally upended my animus for Tax Day. Here, then, are the Five Reasons I Totally Love Tax Day (and Why You Should Too):

1. Tax Day Forced Me to Get My Fiscal Shit Together

2. Children, It Turns Out, Are Extremely Fragile

3. George W. Bush Is No Longer President

4. Anything the Tea Partiers Are Against, I'm For

5. I Believe in Playground Justice

Because I have two small children, I spend a lot of time at playgrounds these days. The rules on the playground are simple: you share. I tell my 3-year-old this all the time. "Can you share?" I say. And, "Big girls need to learn to share." And, "I'm serious, Josie, if you don't share we're going home."

This doesn't make me a socialist. It just makes me an adult, someone who recognizes that the pursuit of happiness in the midst of limited resources requires sacrifice.

Tax Day is our annual reminder of this fact. It reminds us that one of the prices of citizenship in these United States is the levying of taxes, to provide for all the stuff I've mentioned above, along with, you know, a common defense.

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Our frequently-excellent local columnist Danny Westneat had some good insights on this too, after attending a Tea-Party gathering, something I'm not sure I could take in, with or without sweetener (and maybe even sedation):

The tea partyers aren't crazy. Maybe they're just living in an alternate universe

I went to one of those tea-party tax protests last week and found it didn't fit the crudest media stereotypes

They were friendly, not a bunch of whack jobs in training for the militia, as they are sometimes portrayed

The ones I met didn't even seem all that angry.

But: I do wonder if the tea partyers and I live on the same planet.\

For instance, several speakers inspired the crowd with stories about how the most courageous and noble people left are the capitalists. Because they bravely walk the road of struggle against a powerful, socialistic bureaucracy.

And I'm thinking — didn't the capitalists just nearly destroy capitalism? Only to be saved by the socialists?

Didn't all that happen just a year and a half ago?

Then there's the matter of taxes.

"Born Free, Taxed to Death," read one tea-party sign. "Tax Slaves Unite," said another.

"Welcome to France," read a third.

That was a strong theme — the way our Marxist government incessantly gropes in our pockets for more of our hard-earned money.

A cry went up: "Taxes Suck!"

Yes they do. But here's something else about taxes, at least the federal kind. Did you know that total federal tax receipts, as a percentage of the size of the economy (gross domestic product), are now the lowest in 60 years?

You have to travel back to 1950 for a time when the feds sucked so little of the economy up in taxes. We now pay only 6.4 percent of GDP in individual income taxes, more than a third lower than 10 years ago.

Corporate income taxes are the lowest since 1936.

(To see this data, go to the U.S. Government Printing Office Web site of historic budget tables, www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy11/hist.html, and click on Table 2.3.)

These factoids won me no love at the Taxed Enough Already (TEA) rally.

But they're true. Multiple rounds of tax-cutting since 2000, spanning both Republican and Democratic presidents, have been so thorough that half of Americans now pay no individual income taxes.

Hurray! We're not France after all. We're Monaco.

OK, not exactly. Last year 14.8 percent of the U.S. economy went to all federal taxes (which includes Social Security and Medicare taxes). That's hardly nothing, but it's a lot less than a decade ago.

So what, exactly, are these protesters protesting?

Bryan Suits, a talk-radio host on conservative AM station 570 KVI, is, he says, "one of the angry taxpayers." He spoke at last week's rally. I told him I don't follow the tea-party logic, so he agreed to be a guide.

It's the spending, stupid, he said. Suits, to his credit, acknowledged taxes have gotten lower. What rankles him is the way the money is used. The bailouts. The huge stimulus package. The new entitlement program created by the health-care bill.

"If I paid only one dollar in federal taxes, I'd still be outraged by the bailout or the GM takeover," he said.

It's also the reckless and unsustainable deficits.

All right, now we're getting somewhere. I'm with Suits on that last part about the deficits, so much so I could just about sign up for the tea party.

Or I could if the tea party were serious.

The trouble is, they don't have much appetite for cutting Medicare, Social Security or military spending. They want even lower taxes. Put these views together and the math says the budget can't balance. Even if you eliminate 100 percent of everything else.

So what they fall back on are old gimmicks, such as a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution.

The tea party's focus on deficits is right on. But it needs to get real. It needs a Ross Perot-like figure to spell out an honest plan — one that's probably going to have both tax increases and spending cuts (as Bill Clinton pushed through).

Also, drop the red-scare rhetoric. And run as fast as you can from bumper-sticker simpletons like Sarah Palin.

Otherwise, this tea party's stuck in Wonderland.

And, going for the trifecta I guess, I have the great Joan Walsh of Salon, calling it what it is, i.e., racism:

Salon's Numerologist, David Jarman, nails it today: He combines the widely covered CBS/New York Times poll on the Tea Partiers -- no surprise, they're white, and they think President Obama is doing too much for black people; some surprise, they're wealthier than the average voter -- with a less-covered University of Washington poll that finds they also doubt the hard work, intelligence and trustworthiness of black people.

The Times poll was enlightening: Yes, they're white, older, male and Republican; 56 percent make over $50,000 a year and 12 percent make over $250,000. They're more likely to rely on Social Security and Medicare than the average voter -- and, no surprise, they tend to approve of those two programs. The Times goes on:

    More than half say the policies of the administration favor the poor, and 25 percent think that the administration favors blacks over whites -- compared with 11 percent of the general public.

    They are more likely than the general public, and Republicans, to say that too much has been made of the problems facing black people. 

As my friend Digby points out, make that "way more likely: 52% of them think that as compared to only 28% of the general public." (Digby delves into much more detail about the poll, here.)

But Jarman also digs into a University of Washington poll released last week that looked at the views of Tea Party supporters in seven battleground states. Not only do they think too much is made of the problems facing black people, they have bigoted views about black people generally. Jarman explains:

    People who think that "the U.S. government has done too much to support blacks" were 36 percent more likely to support the Tea Party than those who didn’t think so. Among whites who approve of the Tea Party, only 35 percent said they believe blacks are hard-working, only 45 percent believe blacks are intelligent, and just 41 percent believe that they’re trustworthy.

And Tea Party supporters don't like it when anyone notices the racists in their midst?

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Nastiness seems to be the upper bar for the behavior of repubes these days – but then that has actually been the case for years, perhaps largely because they have been too rarely challenged by our cowardly electees, who hightail it at the actual mention of a filibuster.  Why not get those racist, bigoted, anti-American, unpatriots out there on the floor where CSPAN can help us get a good long look at 'em?  Actually, the killing of the filibuster seems a wise move (if only).  We will have to do all we can to brace those few vertebrate Dems we have over the months leading to the next election.