The Tax Day Coalition

A lot of digital ink has been spilled on these pages over the tax day “Tea Party” protests. Not all of it has been supportive, but I think there’s to some extent a need to clear the air and explain our position. Granted, this is a group blog and I can’t quite speak for everyone here, but we’ve had some backroom discussions so hopefully I’ll give a general enough overview.

The Liberty Papers has signed up to be a part of the Tax Day Coalition.

There are a lot of conflicting thoughts about this. There is some concern over whether the Tea Party has been co-opted by the type of folks who had no problem with the big spending of the Republicans over the last 8 years, and only seem to have that “come to Jesus” moment when they realize that it’s the opponents who are holding the purse strings. To some extent, of course, the levels of spending we’re seeing are a pretty significant expansion on those of the Bush administration, and many of those on the Right applauded his big war spending and national security spending, and forgave the NCLB and Medicare Part D spending as politically necessary to keep “the agenda” moving forward.

Either way, we see a large group of people opposed to high taxes and high spending. And that’s a good thing. The art of politics is knowing where coalitions can be formed, and making use of them. We see the populist appeal of this movement, and we see this as the tangible reaction of a group of people who have been betrayed by their own party but were too internally conflicted to organize resistance until they were out of power. They’ve come back to the correct side of the debate now, so it’s a good idea to work together rather than fight them out of a libertarian purity purge.

The Liberty Papers has been fighting against this taxation and spending since we formed this blog in 2005. We’re not joining the Tax Day Coalition, we’re excited that the Tax Day Coalition is joining US.