Tea Partiers fail history (again)
Of Tea and Taxes: Understanding the Boston Tea Party

The Boston Tea Party does resonate with today’s debates about bailouts and deficit spending. The lessons here, though, are not about taxes but about how fights over taxes stand in for deeper political fissures: In the 1700s over the right to self-government, now over whom government should help and whom it should punish. To get to these lessons, it helps to know that the law that precipitated that tea dumping in Boston harbor was a tax cut.

Far from the onerous tax increase that most Americans assume it was, the Tea Act of 1773 was part of what we might think of as an economic stimulus program — an aggressive effort to keep afloat the struggling British East India Company by cutting taxes and regulations.

Heh.