"The Boston Tea Party was ultimately precipitated by a massive corporate
tax cut.

In 1773, the only major multinational corporation at the time, the
British East India Company, was teetering on the verge of bankruptcy.
According to that obviously liberal organization, the Boston Tea Party
Historical Society, one solution was to bail out the corporation by
offering it a government loan. But instead, at the urging of the East
India Company's powerful lobbyists and supported by King George III,
Parliament passed the Tea Act which almost entirely eliminated the duty
-- the tax -- on British tea exported by the East India Company to the
American colonies. How do we know this? Well, the actual subtitle of the
Tea Act, for one:

An act to allow a drawback of the duties of customs on the
exportation of tea to any of his Majesty's colonies or plantations in
America; to increase the deposit on bohea tea to be sold at the East
India Company's sales; and to empower the commissioners of the treasury
to grant licences to the East India Company to export tea duty-free.


The rationale was that lower taxes meant lower prices, which meant the
East India Company would sell a lot more tea. Your basic free market
precursor to Reaganomics and supply-side economics in action. In other
words, the British government's solution to the East India Company's
financial crisis was, in effect, a tax cut. A big one. Exactly the same
economic solution that's been pushed by congressional Republicans and
the tea bag revolutionaries 236 years later.


The tax cut was viewed by colonial patriots as another example of
British tyranny against smaller merchants whose business would be
severely undercut. Consequently, political activists and, most famously,
the Sons of Liberty, organized a boycott against the East India
Company's tea. And later that year, when the Dartmouth, Beaver and
Eleanor were docked in Boston harbor, the Sons carried out their famous
protest.

So. Whoops.

It turns out that that the tea baggers, led in part by Michelle Malkin,
Glenn Reynolds and the Coward Rick Santelli, are politically more in
line with the tax policies of King George than the views of the Sons of
Liberty and the colonial patriots. The tax baggers emulating a protest
against a corporate tax cut -- but, oddly, in support of tax cuts for
the rich and corporations. Furthermore, King George was against a
corporate bailout loan. And so are the tea baggers. And I don't think
it'd be a stretch to suggest that many of the tea baggers are recipients
of the president's middle class tax cut."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-ce..._b_176476.html