Students traversing White Plaza this Thursday, April 15, will have the opportunity to witness the debut of a new student group: The Stanford Tea Party. A fitting date for the Tea Party’s premiere, April 15 is the dreaded day by which Americans must file income tax returns. The process of filing returns with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) may seem a daunting experience, and, unless one plans to make a career of tax accounting, one may be flummoxed by the intricacies of tax law. Thankfully, as full time students, the majority of us do not have to contend with the aches and pains of complicated tax returns.
Just because we’re not frantically assembling receipts and filling out IRS paperwork on April 14 doesn’t mean that we should blithely write off the 15th as that one day other people wring their hands and pull their hair over taxes. As college graduates, we will be likely to join the ranks of the highly taxed income brackets in our country. Though it’s popular to demonize “the rich” in the hackneyed Robin Hood saga, the fact remains that “greedy,” profit-seeking capitalists provide the majority of the money that keeps our government floating (or, these days, sinking less quickly).
Since the near future may entail forking over more than a quarter of our incomes to our government, it behooves us to be wary of how that money is spent. With the United States national debt currently surpassing $12.8 trillion, deficit projections of $9.1 trillion in the coming decade and President Obama’s own assertion that “we are out of money,” concerns about reckless spending and government inefficiencies are most certainly merited. One might think that the debt crisis would compel the administration to scrutinize deficit spending more carefully and reign in government expenses. One would be mistaken. Obama’s solution: a proposed $989 billion increase in taxes over the course of the next decade on individuals and businesses. So, we’re going to stifle businesses and individual innovations with hefty taxes as we continue to pour money into stimulus packages (unemployment is still climbing), bank bailouts (too big to fail), social security (no one is pretending that the system is going to survive anymore) and now healthcare!
Enter the Tea Party Movement. Painted by critics as a radical fringe group of crazy-white-racist-male-libertarians, the movement is, at its core, a non-partisan grassroots organization that promotes a balanced budget and reduced spending. Members participate in peaceful protests of what they deem unconstitutional taxation and downright asinine spending policies. The Tea Party Patriots Web site outlines the movement’s mission: “the impetus for the Tea Party movement is excessive government spending and taxation. Our mission is to attract, educate, organize and mobilize our fellow citizens to secure public policy consistent with our three core values of Fiscal Responsibility, Constitutionally Limited Government and Free Markets.”
According to a Gallup poll, “Tea Partiers are fairly mainstream in their demographics.” Though Tea Party supporters skew right politically, they are generally representative of the American public in terms of age, education and race. This finding contradicts the angry white man label and suggests that anti-Tea Party groups such as Crash the Tea Party, which claim to be sick and tired of the “loose affiliation of racists, homophobes and morons,” might need to rethink their critiques.
Tax Day Tea Party protests express concerns about the recklessness of government spending. This Thursday, Stanford students sharing these concerns will rally in White Plaza from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., launching a Stanford Tea Party.
Bring a cup of tea and your Bill of Rights: [email protected] .