Jenny Beth Martin, Tea Party Patriots Founder, Collecting Half-Million Dollar Government Bailout [View all]

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Jenny Beth Martin, Tea Party Patriots Founder, Collecting Half-Million Dollar Government Bailout

Posted by: Josh Kilburn
June 24, 2014


There’s a documented phenomena on the political right: they’ll stand strong against something, say, government help, until they need it. Then, suddenly, it’s something that they deserve. And them alone, because they’ll go right back to protesting it after they get it. A case in point is Jenny Beth Martin, the co-founder and head of the Tea Party Patriots, who recalled her bankruptcy to the Washington Post and wound up highlighting this sort of “all for me, none for thee” hypocrisy that is rife on the political right.

The Daily Kos, quoting from the Washington Post article,says that Martin and her husband wound up owing the IRS $500,000 after their company failed. Martin, described as a “wellspring for that odd Tea Party message of anti-government self-reliance,” ended up filing bankruptcy to avoid the $500,000 in back taxes. As the Washington Post reports:

“I was very frustrated by the TARP bill, because nobody bailed us out, and we weren’t looking for a bailout,” Martin says in a coffee shop outside of Jackson. It’s a message she uses often, saying that no one bailed out her husband’s company when it failed. As for being bailed out themselves, Martin has had to publicly contend with the fact that she and her husband filed for bankruptcy, a bailout of its own sort.

Make no mistake: bankruptcy is a bailout, and that’s still $500,000 that the American taxpayers will have to pick up. But that’s okay. It’s preferable to the other option, which seems so popular today: smugly and self-righteously watching as someone drowns because they made one single mistake, because they weren’t absolutely perfect, rather than throwing them a life-preserver and saving them.

Less well known is the fact that her husband accepted unemployment for a time, something else she has explained.

“I’ve never said that there should be no safety net,” she says. “That decision was more difficult for him than the decision not to stay in our house. . . . We were scraping by.”

This is the difference between the Tea Party and the liberals. The Tea Party and those on the right-wing want the social safety net there for themselves, but not for anyone else. Liberals likewise want it there for themselves as well, but they also realize that if it exists for them, it exists for others, too, and we’ve accepted that fact. We’ve moved beyond it, integrated it into who we are into our political identity. We’re okay with people we don’t know using it.

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http://aattp.org/jenny-beth-martin-tea-party-patriots-founder-collecting-a-half-million-dollar-government-bailout/