Dear Tea Party: I Love Tax Day

Steve Almond used to hate taxes. But now he hates the Tea Party movement (or, more accurately, the Tea Party's “series of highly publicized tantrums”) even more…and he’s ready to confess something “almost heretical”: He actually loves Tax Day. Here’s why:

• It made him organized: Not only does this newfound organization protect him from an IRS audit or, you know, prison…it also helps him to analyze his spending, which makes it “much harder to fall prey to the junk mail come-ons of credit card companies," he writes on Salon.

• It helps his children: Now that Almond has kids, things like “the quality of my drinking water and food and local public schools and parks and playgrounds and roads” actually matter to him.
• It’s not helping George W. Bush: “It's hard to pay taxes, particularly federal taxes, when the administration in power is disinterested in governing. Or, more precisely, when it views government's essential function as an enabler of corporate greed.”
• It’s the Tea Partiers’ least favorite thing: And anything these paranoid, self-pitying, “for-profit demagogues” are against, Almond is for. The Tea Party’s “mindless and violent hatred for Tax Day stands as one of the best reasons to love Tax Day.”

For his last reason, click here. (More tea parties stories.)