The Tucson Tea Party tax protest is organizing now. It is scheduled for April 15, the day tax returns are due. The protest is patterned on the Boston Tea Party in which revolutionaries dumped a cargo of tea into Boston Harbor to protest a tax imposed on it by Great Britain. It’s a long way to any harbor from Tucson. They could pour some sun tea into the Santa Cruz, but it wouldn’t have the same impact.

Nevertheless, the point is to gather a sufficient crowd to alert the tax-raisers in Washington, D.C., and Phoenix there is resistance to any further taxation. Arizona’s state budget shortfall is putting pressure on state government to find new sources of revenue.

The problem is revenue is down due to the declines in business activity. Sales tax collection for February was off 18 percent and income taxes were off 33 percent. This does not suggest taxpayers are feeling flush and are in a generous mood.

Print this story Email this story Post a Comment ADVERTISEMENT

State lawmakers realize they are in deep droppings with a deficit of around $3 billion, give or take a few million. A billion dollars used to sound like a lot before we became inured to expenditures in the trillions. But here in bucolic Arizona, a billion is still a billion and a shortfall of $3 billion is a lot of real money.

I say real money to distinguish it from the virtual money the Fed can concoct with the click of a mouse. It would solve a lot of problems if Arizona could create money out of nothing that way, but the feds are pretty compulsive about protecting their monopoly on creating currency.

However, lawmakers in Phoenix are not sweating profusely because they expect federal funny money under the feds’ program to buy state governments with “stimulus dollars.” That will probably turn out to be a mistake. Every state that has taken stimulus money has found or will find that it sold its sovereign soul to the federal government, as has every business that was “stimulated.”

You think we resented federal impositions before, now we will have to take orders from Washington. We will have taken their money.

The Tucson Tea Party tax protest will start at 9 a.m. in Presidio Park, 160 W. Alameda St., behind the government buildings complex downtown. Media coverage will include live cut-in reports from the scene by no fewer than two radio stations: The Truth KQTH 104.1-FM will have Jon Justice broadcasting his show from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. and KNST 790-AM will have Jim Parisi doing about the same thing at the same time. Since they will both be there well before the protest officially starts, maybe they will actually interview each other. If they do that, set one radio to one of the stations, and place another opposite it tuned to the other station and you will be able to listen to it in stereo. Remember those days?

If you’re too busy or too lazy to attend personally, you can not only listen on the two radio stations, you can watch through the public access surveillance camera at http://transview.org/cams/Presidio/.

But don’t do any of those things unless it is your only way. Your attendance is needed to demonstrate resolution. How impressed will our lawmakers be if protestors couldn’t even rouse themselves to attend the protest personally?

It’s a good thing they didn’t have all these electronic means of attendance in Boston in 1773. If everybody there phoned in their attendance, today we’d all be driving Aston-Martins on the left side of the road and speaking English.

Scheduled speakers at the protest — who are not radio talk show hosts —

 include Gary Pierce, a member of the Arizona Corporation Commission, and Nick Dranias, director of the Goldwater Institute’s Center for Constitutional Government. Others are to be announced.

This protest is organized by Robert Mayer, a student at the University of Arizona, who will probably earn a hard time from his liberal professors. I hear there are a few of them there.

Contact Lionel Waxman at territorial@waxmanmedia.com or visit his website: www.waxmanmedia.com. Lionel Waxman’s Flashpoint commentaries are published in The Daily Territorial.