Exactly 250 years from the event that started the Revolution
Dan Hannan
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Exactly 250 years ago, on Dec. 16, 1773, a gang of rowdies, some dressed as Mohawk braves, boarded three merchant ships in Boston Harbor and, over three hours, dumped 342 chests of tea into the cold waves. A new law had, in fact, lowered the price of tea, but they still resented paying a token levy on it.
Everyone knows the American Revolution began as a taxpayer revolt. What not everyone realizes is that that taxpayer revolt started on the other side of the Atlantic. Great Britain had had to whack up taxes to pay for the French and Indian War, and residents of the colonies were largely exempt. By the late 1760s, the average British adult paid 25 shillings a year in tax, but the average colonist paid only sixpence. British MPs, under pressure from their hard-pressed constituents, wanted to address this imbalance by making Americans assume part of the cost of their own defense.
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What happened next was, in one of those ironies in which history abounds, enormously expensive for all involved. The country gentlemen in Parliament who had authorized the use of force to get revenue from the colonies ended up imposing vast new land and legacy duties on their constituents to pay for the war. American patriots who had taken up arms rather than pay what was demanded ended up, after independence, taxing themselves far more harshly than they had ever been taxed under the crown.
It turns out that people don’t care about low taxes nearly as much as they think they do. Or, more precisely, that fiscal conservatism is the first thing to go in a crisis.
The modern Tea Party movement, which claimed direct inspiration from those Bostonian hotheads, has followed the same trajectory, losing interest even as spending has surged.
“Because of tariffs we will be able to start paying down large amounts of the $21 trillion in debt that has been accumulated, much by the Obama administration,” former President Donald Trump declared at the start of his presidency, forgetting that tariffs are themselves a tax on Americans.
Needless to say, it did not work. Protectionism never does. The national debt rose by $7.8 trillion during Trump’s presidency — twice what people owe on their student loans, car loans, and credit cards combined. Under Trump, everyone ran up the equivalent of $23,500 in new federal debt.
Yes, part of that increase was accounted for by the lockdowns. But the splurge had begun well before then. At the end of 2019, debt had risen to $23.2 trillion, a debt all the more inexcusable because it was being amassed at a time of strong growth.
“Not since World War II has the country seen deficits during times of low unemployment that are as large as those that we project — nor, in the past century, has it experienced large deficits for as long as we project,” the Congressional Budget Office said in January 2020, on the eve of the pandemic.
Where was the Tea Party while all this was going on? It had lost interest. Indeed, it more or less folded when Trump won in 2016, making fools of those like me who had argued that its supporters were motivated by fiscal conservatism rather than, as the Left alleged, by resentment of former President Barack Obama.
All of which makes the Tea Party’s silence today even more bizarre. Yes, spending fell slightly at the start of the Biden presidency as furlough and the emergency grants decreed during the lockdown were wound up. But it is now shooting up again. The federal deficit in 2023 has jumped to $1.7 trillion, an astonishing 23% increase on the prior year. And no one seems bothered.
America has moved on to culture wars. Who cares about record peacetime debt levels when we can instead argue about whether a white man could get away with the president of Harvard’s plagiarism?
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Well, I care. I care that the U.S. deficit is now the single biggest threat to its security and, by implication, the survival of the Western world order. I don’t believe that the Republican congressmen refusing to fund Ukraine are chiefly motivated by parsimony. Dislike of President Joe Biden, a lingering resentment of Ukraine’s cameo role in the Trump impeachment, and a fear of Putin-leaning primary voters are a bigger factor. But if the United States were running a surplus, they would have no excuse.
The sad fact is that, during the lockdowns, a lot of people came to expect government handouts. The reason there is no meaningful Tea Party movement is that there is no demand for one. What a sad way to mark the anniversary.