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| Image from The Baffler, September 2019 (covering the tenth anniversary celebrations of Tea Party Patriots Action, an organization founded in 2017) |
More "economic anxiety", right at the top of the original Tea Party food chain, in this ill-organized but enthralling piece by Stephanie Mencimer at Mother Jones:
Jenny Beth Martin happened to hear CNBC contributor Rick Santelli on her
car radio. He was ranting from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange
about the administration’s plan to bail out homeowners at risk of
foreclosure—or, as he called them, “losers.” “This is America!” he shouted.
“How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgages [when they
have] an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?”
Martin was primed for this message. A graduate of the University of Georgia
and the daughter of a Methodist minister, she’d been involved in Republican
politics for years, volunteering for Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) and later
working as a GOP consultant. For about eight years, her husband, Lee, had
owned a company that supplied temporary workers to local businesses. The
company went belly up in 2007, court records show, and the Martins filed for
bankruptcy. In 2009, they were more than $1.4 million in debt. Lee owed the
IRS $1 million and more than $172,000 to Georgia’s tax authorities. The
Martins eventually lost their home and their twin Lincoln Navigators.
Their own economic calamity did not make the Martins more sympathetic to the
victims of the Great Recession. “The contrast hit me hard,” Martin wrote in
the 2012 book she co-authored with Mark Meckler (now the interim CEO of
Parler), Tea Party Patriots: The Second American Revolution. “While my husband and I cleaned our neighbors’ bathrooms to pay our bills,
our taxes were being spent by our government to pay for the mortgages of
people who could not, or would not, pay their bills.”
Honey, you don't seem to have been paying your taxes. And that million dollars wasn't income tax (which is generally dischargeable under Chapter 7 bankruptcy), either, unless it was willfully evaded tax (as in repeated failure to pay, or failure to file returns) or fraud (such as hiding bank accounts from IRS). Most likely at least some of it was the payroll tax you should have been paying for your workers in that rent-seeking enterprise in which you extruded cash out of the local economy's desire to get work done without paying benefits.
