Rich Benjamin, a senior fellow at Demos, writing in USA Today:
Every spring I pay a visit to Howard Carlin, my tax accountant, to settle my dues. Howard’s upbeat personality, peppered with quirky quips, lightens the proceedings. Click, click, click, go his rapid-motion fingers. The numbers whir on screen like a digital slot machine. Up pops a figure. “See?” Howard chimes. “That’s your tax burden.” I wrinkle my nose. This faux disgust is just a ceremonial knee-jerk gesture, as if showing my solidarity with the millions of other Americans who vilify taxes.
But deep in my bones, that place that speaks my mind, I am proud and glad to pay my income taxes.
Others, especially those in the “Tea Party” movement, are not. Their battle cry, Taxed Enough Already (TEA), amplifies a crescendo of discontent over taxes (though they rarely specify which kinds) and government spending.
The Tea Party movement comprises protesters politically awakened by the recession. Many Tea Partiers voice their protest by describing lives freshly toppled by a layoff, a foreclosure, a bankruptcy, a catastrophic illness, a depleted retirement account. The irony? Their political complaint — “socialist tyranny,” “high taxes,” “stimulus spending” — often defies any credible explanation of their individual financial woe.
Read on for a rousing good argument. It’s unlikely to persuade you if you lean to the Right — even though he quotes Benjamin Franklin and The Founding Fathers. I came away remembering that back in the 1970s there were those hollering “love it or leave it.” Only now do I know where they were coming from.
Howard happens to be my tax man, too. And, like Rich, I am proud and glad to pay my income taxes.