"A toast to the tea party protesters"

David Horsey (Seattle P-I):

The ironic thing about all the anti-tax tea parties that were thrown all over the USA on Wednesday is who would benefit most from a cut in tax rates.

As reported by the cheerleading faux journalists on FOX News, most of the folks who rallied at various state capitals across the nation were not members of the top 10 percent of citizens who pay 72 percent of the taxes. No, the guests at these tea parties were middle class and blue collar folks who struggle to pay the bills every day. Spoon-fed rage by the likes of FOX commentators Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck, they expressed anger about a lot of things -- high taxes, the skyrocketing federal deficit, government bailouts, creeping socialism and that socialist creep in the White House. For them, it all adds up to robbery: taking money from hard-working Americans and giving it to both rich Wall Street shysters and poor people who can't pay the mortgages they never should have gotten in the first place.

I can't blame the tea party demonstrators for being uneasy about the current state of the nation. The looming $10 trillion national debt is frightening and incomprehensible. The financiers who wrecked the economy while grabbing billions of dollars for themselves are vile and greedy creatures who ought to be set up in a perpetual dunking tank, if not in jail. And the fact I have to pay about a third of my income in taxes doesn't make me all that happy, considering that so much of that money will be spent to undo the damage that has been done by those vile and greedy billionaires.

However, I can't subscribe to the logic of the protesters because it is... well, illogical. They are looking for simple answers and somebody to blame. Hannity and his crowd have supplied the answer -- cut taxes -- and the blame target -- Barack Obama. But, unless you live in a world of right-wing paranoia, neither explanation makes much sense.

Who would benefit most from a tax cut? Not the tea party protesters. They may be struggling to pay taxes right now, but that is likely because they are struggling to pay for everything, thanks to an economic system that, over the last couple of decades, has been skewed in favor of the wealthy. While middle class earnings have stagnated or fallen, a few people have enjoyed enormous gains -- people like the pirates on Wall Street, along with celebrity commentators like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh. They would be the real beneficiaries of any major decrease in taxation.

And who would like to offer up some government programs to be eliminated to pay for those tax cuts? Yeah, make a list of pork barrel projects and poverty programs and you'll come up with a few billion. But, if you really want to cut government spending, you'll have to get into the big stuff like the military budget, Social Security and Medicare. Do I hear howls of "support our troops?" Do I see a legion of senior citizens forming to defend their Social Security checks and health care? Well, alright, leave those alone.

Instead, let's just skip the Wall Street bailout that our children and grandchildren will be paying off. But wait, most of the economists in the country insist that, distasteful as it may be, only the government can prop up our teetering financial system, the collapse of which would bring consequence far more dire than a big deficit. Is anyone willing to risk a depression? (On the plus side, if you lose your job or business in an economic meltdown, you won't have to pay taxes.)

Complexities like these are just so infuriatingly confusing. I understand that. I understand it is more satisfying to tune into Hannity and listen to him talk about his self-reliant famliy members, as he did a couple of days ago. He mentioned his Irish immigrant grandparents who arrived in America and didn't expect to have national health care and his dad who served in World War II and didn't come home asking for a bailout. Hannity says he pulled himself up by his own bootstraps and never asked for anything from the government either, implying that those who do are courting socialism.

I wonder though, did Hannity's grandparents end up on Social Security? Did his father take advantage of the GI Bill? Is he now using Medicare? Did Hannity go to a public school or a state-supported university? Perhaps the Hannity family avoided any government benefit (and have refused to drive on any government-built highway, refused to eat any government-inspected food, refused to visit any government-run national park or refused to breathe any air made clean by government regulations). Not all of us can claim to have been so pure, however. The truth is, there are very few government services we would happily give up because they have made our country a more civilized place.

But, dang it, we just don't like having to pay for it. And, these days, when we are shelling out enormous amounts to try to climb out of a deep financial hole that someone else put us in, it's natural for those on the right to blame it all on the people on the left. Having lost the last election, it's no surpise to hear a conservative woman at the tea party in Sacramento declare on FOX TV, "We want our country back!"

Hey, we all want our country back. But I just don't think it was taken away by Barack Obama or any secret socialists. It was taken away by greedy fools who built a Ponzi scheme in which we all got trapped. And they didn't build it last week or last month. They built it during the pre-Obama, anti-tax, anti-regulatory era -- a time, oddly enough, during which Sean Hannity built a lucrative career by saying government is always bad and markets are always good.

Better enjoy your tea, protesters. Hannity's sipping champagne.

Howie P.S.: It takes a Pulitzer-prize-winning cartoonist to explain the simple truth to us, with words and an image.