The ironic statistic du jour is that, despite Tea Party howling, 47 percent of American families are paying no federal taxes on their income this year.
Most are households with young children and (pace the white-haired, red-faced ragers at rallies) the elderly, benefiting from Obama-sponsored stimulus measures, most notably a 2009 reprieve from mandatory withdrawals from their pension plans.
As instant-gratification Baby Boomers begin to qualify for retirement, much older members of that group may see their surge of anti-government feeling as owing more to an exaggerated sense of entitlement than the loudly proclaimed Tea Party yearning for a more pristine past.
The really elderly remember a post-World War II era, presided over by a popular Republican in the White House, when the top tax bracket was 84 percent rather than today’s 35, with no public outcry.
The only audible grumbling came from those New Yorker cartoon figures in upper-crust men’s clubs and, on one occasion, John Wayne, the celluloid cowboy, whom I told, “If I were getting that many millions of dollars for making faces at cameras, I wouldn’t complain about giving most of it back to people who buy tickets to see me do it.”
But those were other days, when mainstream patriotism was about loving America rather than hating other Americans in a time when most of those elected to serve in Washington were working against prejudice rather than stoking it for political gain.