As one gets older, memories merge and memories blur and sometimes, what you remember as fact, turns out to be a fiction and not a fact at all.  Take the Boston Tea Party as an example.  I would venture that a large number of Americans truly believe that the spark that ignited the dumping of Tea into Boston Harbor by people dressed up as native Americans, was a tax INCREASE on Tea … and they, like I was, would be wrong.

The Tea Act, passed by Parliament on May 10, 1773, did, indeed, launch the final spark for the revolutionary movement in Boston. However, that act did not raise the tea tax for the American colonies.  It imposed no new taxes at all on the colonists. Instead, it repealed the tax for the East India Company (EIC) tea shipped directly to the colonies, allowing (EIC) to sell tea at a bargain basement prices, undercutting local colonial trade. It was a massive corporate tax break intended to break the backbone of the burgeoning colonial trade.

The TRUE story of the Tea Party

While the Tea Party of old protested a corporate tax break that hampered colonial trade, today’s Tea Party seem obsessed with protecting corporate tax breaks and loopholes that are breaking the backs of our nation and the middle class.