On tax-day last week, several hundred people holding signs on the Maine State Pier watched as Fred Staples opened a box wrapped with brown paper and string.
“This is the federal stimulus package,” he said, as he reached into the box and pulled out a length of rusty chain, the crowd erupting in approval
“This is the ‘chains’ you can believe in.”
On April 15, 750 groups across the country held “Tax-day Tea Parties” protesting governmental spending and what attendees deemed excessive taxation.
The protests were aimed at President Obama’s $787 billion federal stimulus package and $3.5 trillion federal budget, expenditures that were mocked at the Portland event with signs reading: “stop making me pay for the irresponsible,” and “social programs are not a career choice- I work for a living.”
Staples, the executive director os Maine Taxpayer’s United and an organizer of last week’s Tea Party, held to the long-running conservative viewpoint that the federal government should stay out of the affairs of private enterprise, and spend as little as possible.
“The stimulus was the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back. government has gotten too big, too intrusive, too expensive,” he said.
Una Connors, a retiree from Brunswick who attended the rally weaing tea bags as earrings, said that the burden on the next generations of taxpayers was a prime cause for her presence at the tea party.
“We’re talking about 3-4 generations after me who are going to be paying for this huge stimulus bill,” she said.
Concern over the next generation’s share of repaying the federal deficit was a major concern among those who attended. One protestor held up a sign featuring a large photo of a young girl in a pink dress, the slogan below it reading, “Obama- Thanks for ruining her future.”
Despite the anxiety over ‘generational theft,’ relatively few protestors at last week’s rally were representative of future generations of taxpayers. By one speaker’s estimation, the average age of those in attendance was 40.
“There weren’t a lot of college students there,” Staples said last Friday.
The reason for a lack of young people is simple, he says: they don’t pay enough taxes yet.
“College students generally are not in the workforce and haven’t experienced the oppressive taxation yet,” he said.
According to Connors, younger people have never been that involved in discussions about tax policy.
“Young people concern themselves with a lot of other things besides politics; it’s just the way it is. They’re trying to establish themselves, grow into adulthood,” she said.
“I wasn’t [involved] when I was young, it was just background noise.”
Kyle Hodgkins, a Junior Business Administration major at USM, was one of the few college-aged attendees.
“I wanted to come down to this event to show my disapproval of the current taxes of the Obama administration,” he said. “America wasn’t founded upon the fact that you can be taxed. It was founded on free market principles.”
Although the event borrowed the name of the original Boston Tea Party, last week’s event lacked the fervor of the infamous 1773 uprising against British colonial taxation. Tea bags were worn as jewelry, not dumped in mass quantities in Casco Bay.
“We’re more civilized now,” said Connors.
“The type of people who come out aren’t the ‘rough’ type, they are a lot mellower,” said 18 year-old Portland resident Matthew Scribner.
One of the speakers at the rally, Ray Richardson, a talk show host for WLOB, said that the event was not about demonstrating anger.
“The Press Herald called it an angry mob,” he said, referring to Bill Nemitz’s column on April 14, which referred to the Tea Party as a “full-blown temper-tantrum.”
“I haven’t heard anger, I’ve heard concern,” Richardson said.
Richardson told the crowd that being angry at Obama’s policies isn’t the way to enact change.
“President Obama has not lied to us. he said what he was, and he is what he is,” he said.
According to Richardson, the way for conservatives to get involved and make a change is to start at the grassroots level.
“All politics is local,” he said.
“If we can’t win the little battles, we’re not going to win the big battles. let’s get ’em.”