After USA Today ran a story dissing the TEA Party movement and boasting that federal taxes took "only" 9.1% from the average taxpayers' hard-earned money, the guys over at NRO sent over a letter of response.
Not surprisingly, USA Today wouldn't print it. (Too true. Too anti-Obama. No colored pie charts.)
But you'd like to read it, wouldn't you? Sure. Here it is.
“Tax rhetoric vs. reality” (USA Today –April 17, 2009) missed the point of the Tea Party demonstrations. They were objecting to today’s out-of-control spending that will send our taxes—and our kids’ taxes—through the roof.
Thanks to just three bills—the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the so-called stimulus bill and the omnibus spending bill—federal spending has soared 33 percent in just a few months. Federal spending now stands at $33,932 per household, per year.
And that doesn’t include the massive spending increases sought in President Obama’s Budget Blueprint.
Tea Party protesters know all this spending must eventually be paid for—and that means trillions upon trillions in new or higher taxes. Ten years from now, federal taxes alone will have to take up 25 percent of our economy to pay the tab Congress is running up today. Add in state and local income, property, sales and excise taxes—a multitude of other taxes—and you find that Americans will face a tax burden of over 35 percent of GDP in the very near future.
Tea Partiers have trillions of good reasons to protest.