Word: taxes
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...jumped an ocean and half a century to bring forward this episode only because it seems so strikingly relevant. In a curious trick of history, the American Tea Party—those who protest Obama’s tax policies by evoking 1773’s colonial steeping of three shiploads of British loose leaf in Boston Harbor—have much in common with their ex-antagonist country’s Angry Young Men. They’re deeply dissatisfied with the status quo. They think (justifiably) that nobody takes them seriously. They lack any theoretically rigorous suggestions...
...Senate alone boasted moderate Republicans from blue states like Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Oregon, where activist government weren't dirty words. These moderates - who met every Wednesday for lunch - chaired powerful committees, served in the party leadership and helped cut big bipartisan deals like the 1986 tax-reform bill, which simplified the tax code, and the 1990 Clean Air Act, which set new limits on pollution. Second, because Republicans occupied the White House, making government look foolish and corrupt risked making the party look foolish and corrupt...
...same way McConnell and company are acting now. At its core, vicious-circle politics isn't an assault on liberal solutions to hard problems; it's an assault on any solutions to hard problems. It's no surprise that Democrats couldn't successfully filibuster George W. Bush's tax cuts and Republicans couldn't successfully filibuster Obama's stimulus spending. When you're handing out goodies, it's much harder for opponents to gum up the process. As Vanderbilt University's Marc Hetherington has argued, trust in government matters most when government is asking people to make sacrifices...
Similarly, when I was Speaker, President Clinton and I had a series of very tough negotiations, but in the end we accomplished welfare reform, Medicare reform, the first tax cuts in 16 years and the first four consecutive balanced budgets (reducing the public debt by $450 billion) since the 1920s. The public fights were often intense, but the willingness to keep talking and working together led to a number of historic achievements that both Clinton and the congressional Republicans could claim credit for. (See pictures of Gingrich's career...
...Three Flavors of Tea Is anyone organizing all this? Or trying to? Tom Jenney is the Arizona state director of a Washington-based group called Americans for Prosperity (AFP), a low-tax, libertarian advocacy group funded primarily by the wealthy Koch family of Wichita, Kans., and its foundations. With its sister organization FreedomWorks - run by former House majority leader Richard Armey - the AFP nurtured the Tea Party movement in its early days, offering training and logistical support. When Santelli sounded his trumpet, Jenney organized the first Tea Party protests in his state. But the larger the movement has become...