Meet The Tea Partiers: Male, Rich and College Educated

Anger Management Classes and Bartending School do not count as having "attended college".

Yeah. That's about right. I'll go one step further and say that many of them are entrepreneurs or high level management types.

Shocked? You shouldn't be.

My stepfather is a true believer. He fits the demo, but not the way silenced thinks.

He's a cop, white, some education, makes over $50K. He's also a birther. He resents taxes without realizing that every dime and benefit he gets is paid for by taxes. In his view, all taxes are spent on illegals.

BWAHAHA! Yeah, you shouldn't be surprised, that is, unless you have two eyes and ears and have seen footage of any teabagger rally. All white? Yup. Racist? Definitely. Completely ignorant? Without a doubt. Rich and educated? Not even close, except maybe their corporate and congressional sponsors.
But when you just swallow the results of a poll where people make up whatever you want, then of course they're going to be more "rich and educated". The whole "movement" is nothing but a giant hateful and ignorant inferiority complex, so of course they're going to have to pad their resumes, so to speak.
Successful and educated people don't have time to waste at teabagger rallies and all day sit-ins at the capitol.

The incredibillies (college edumacated teascrotes) just use the ones who dress in stars and stripeswear as cover, in case the facists come to take them to the concentration camps that their ScroteBoss Glenda Beck warned them about.

Read the whole thing. It's not like this is a big-ass movement. We're talking about a teeny fringe here, about what the Green Party might get on Election Day in a really good year.

Given money to any organization
associated with the Tea Party
movement
February 12-15, 2020(sic) yes 2% no 97%

Attended a rally or meeting held by any
organization associated with the Tea Party
movement
February 12-15, 2010 yes 5% no 95%

Took any other active steps to support
the Tea Party movement, either in person
or through e-mail or on the internet
February 12-15, 2010 yes 7% no 92%

So if you figure "any other active steps" can be just about anything, including forwarding a chain email, that's seven percent. That's it. The whole thing. A handful of rich people at the top (the first question) trying to instigate an insurrection among the unwashed masses (the second question) in order to influence the rest of us (the third question). And it's not going all that well. Certainly not as well as the anti-Iraq War protests in '03 or the Dean For America movement in '04.

Your left-wing sources have lied to you about the TEA party.

However, lies can be comforting.

Who is John Galt?

Not shocking. They're ordinary right-Republicans. The same clowns who voted for GWB.

The Tea Party bullshit isn't anything new--it's just a psychological way to save face: Rather than admit Republican policy and conservative ideology have been a massive failure they throw a few embarrassing folks overboard (Bush? No, not a REAL conservative) and say the failure was only in not being pure enough.

Presto--same shit, no responsibility, blame their fear and insecurity on the usual liberals blah blah

I assumed the Tea Partiers were die-hard Bush twenty-percenters, trying to re-brand themselves as Independents to stay relevant. If 1/3 say they are Democrats, then I might be wrong.

Other common characteristics: Racism, bigotry, and misogyny.

Well, Sarah Palin is technically a college graduate as well.

Having a college education doesn't necessarily make you intelligent or knowledgable. After all, the guy with a D- average from Party U. is also a college grad. As is Ms. Palin.

"A new CNN poll"

Now that's funny.

Ignorance polling ignorance; it's amazing that the resulting poll is comprehensible.

Wun wud axpekt a Tee Partee poster frum CNN

Hmmm... 4% describe themselves as Democrats and 5% say they voted for a Democratic candidate for US House. Good match.

52% describe themselves as Independent and 44% as Republican, while 87% say they voted for a Republican candidate for US House. Independent my ass.

"According to the results, tea partiers are richer, more male and have more education than the general population."

Hey, wait a minute. That's the same demographic as gay Americans!

The thing I hear most from this group is government is too big? If you check the figures * it’s smaller than it was in 1962, (except for the Judicial Branch). In 1962 the population was 186,537,737, now it's at 315,534,736. If you use the logic of the Glen Beck and Sara Palin, in which everything was better back in the day, it would follow that was because government was bigger. That’s logical right? So we need to we need to hire more government employee’s! Look at the figures during the giddy years of Regan and Bush Senior….biggest government ever!
*http://www.opm.gov/feddata/HistoricalTables/TotalGovernmentSince1962.asp

Then it's official, this is the racist wing of the GOP. As a Black man, I knew this wing existed all along. Change the title from Male to White racist Male.

I agree with 'shortstop' below: the teabag group rank above the US average on income/education because they're white (i.e. members of a cohort with elevated income etc). If you rank them among white people, I suspect you'd see them moving below average.

In short, you're back to the old story of the rural, socially marginal racist; white folks who are worried (usually with good reason) that they're losing ground in society.

This is kind of meaningless, because people who are politically active are likely to be better educated than people who aren't. Why not compare the tea types to progressive activists rather than your average person?

Entirely separate point: I think we may all be overestimating the value of a college diploma.

I worked with plenty of Ivy League grads who were completely clueless.

Example: one who thought the US had interned Chinese-Americans during WWII.

I had to explain to them what constituted Axis v. Allied powers. Then I went to the restroom and screamed.

That person is now managing a well-known hedge fund. Viva the Ivy League meritocracy.

Wow! 80% white means that this movement is 20% non-white . . . 1 in 5. When you see these tea-party rallys in the media, either local or national, the non-white proportion is closer to 1 in 500 than 1 in 5. Do think there might have been a little "fibbin'" going on when responses were provided to the pollster?

If Tea Party membership were subjected to hanging as the punishment for displaying ignorance in their pursuit of free speech, it would be a party of none.

This is the demographic that Tim Pawlenty has attracted. I call it the white guy victims. They're not as smart as they think they are and they aren't doing as well as believe they deserve to do and they blame everyone else for their mediocre lives. And too bad for them, they probably are working as hard as their fathers did, maybe longer hours, fewer benefits, wives working and doing as well or better than they are, but they still can't get all they believe they deserve to have. They've been brainwashed into believing they were going to be the winners of Reaganism and they can't see that they're really among its losers. There is only so much room in the top 1%.

If it is true that the majority of these people are educated then why have we only seen people interviewed at these events that are rather inarticulate and very poorly informed about who has done what in the government? They are not readers. They don't seem to know much about the detail of pending legislation. They don't know about the recent past of what's happened in D.C., etc. They are all poorly informed. They sure don't seem like an educated bunch at all. They seem more like a bunch of angry white racists. Look how spoke at their convention a couple weeks ago.

One aspect of this article really strikes me as inexplicable. The teapartiers are described as "rich" through interpreting the the empirical data of 66% of them made over $50k gross annual income. While I guess that's technically true since non teapartiers had only 42% making over $50k, that's a way, way, way different way to deliniate rich from non-rich than the traditional discussions of the metrics for delineating the two groups.

During the POTUS campaign you weren't rich unless you had a taxable income of $250K which probably meant you made $275-$300K gross. A distinction that like maybe 1-2% of citizens enjoy, and Joe the Plumber tried to will himself into.

As long as members of households making $50 to $100k gross a year (paying max fed and state payroll taxes rates, max local real estate wealth taxes, full freight into group health plans, continouous cash streams into disability, property and auto insurance, full retail residential rates for public service regulated cable, phone, internet, power, fuel, etc. walk around voting like the most important tax discussion to them is federal personal income tax rates on the tens maybe hundreds of billions of dollars that the tiny percentage of Americans making over $250k haul in (money that's essentially uncut by ANY other taxes or socializations), we're f'd.

Why do the middle argue for the rich on income taxes but then ignore the free pass the wealthy get on all the massively more relavent progressive taxes and recurring somewhat socialized household expenses that are only progressive from $0 to about $120K income? The super wealthy pay no more in dollars per individual ( I'd bet it's less in many cases) than the people making $110k for anything (excepting maybe medicare taxes on very high salaries/wages) but income taxes.

For example a healthy millionaire pays less into the healthcare system per year (they leave their money in their wallets until they are actually sick) than say a healthy "best of breed" factory worker, plumber or electrician, even though because health expenses are largely socialized across the whole population (social classes and age groups) the healthy well paid WORKER throughout most of his/her life pays 5 to ten times what his/her actual annual healthcare expenses are every year for decades into group insurance plans and medicare. Then in the end, when any of us enter our end of life years (rich, middle or poor) it's a pure casino of circumstances as to what individuals will reef through millions of dollars in healthcare expenditures, whether personal assets will be collected for those expenses, whether government assistance programs will be depleted, or whether death occurs suddenly with no significant healthcare expenses at all.

I pay more (sometimes by orders of magnitude) and recieve less than the disfortunate for nearly everything except lottery tickets, cigarettes, liquor and unsecured loan interest (if I ever bought any of that stuff). Food, housing, doctors, car insurance, public schools, municipal services, electricity, rent, heating fuel, public transportation, college education, medicine, internet access, telephone service, and I'm sure many others things are available at various forms of need based discounts/ give aways.

I'm not knocking this progressiveness, I actually think it works pretty good. What baffles me is how many in the $50 to $110K crowd who are at or nearing the bitter upper end of so many sliding scales for all these items don't only remain silent about the fact that the sliding scale goes flat at about $110K, lot's of us go absolutely rabid about how unfair and damaging it is to have those super wealthy +$300K/ earners have to pay just a small increment higher than the rest of us on the ONLY thing that they are asked to pay extra for at all - income taxes. It's the same as if a protest group of homeless people, unemployed people, bus boys, hotel maids and day laborers marched on Washington to demand workers making more $75k should have their payroll taxes and group health insurance premiums cut. I don't think that will happen though, those people apparently aren't that stupid.