Salem Illinois Tea Party Patriots

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT THE TEA PARTY MOVEMENT

Where did the Salem Tea Party come from? Less than a month after President Obama and the Congress took office in January of 2009 a bill was passed called the Stimulus Bill (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009).  It was very expensive, was written in secret, was thousands of pages long, and it turned out to be full of waste and pork.  It cost our country $800+ billion.

Most people didn’t realize how much money $800+ billion dollars is. (If  it were possible to spend $1 million a day for all the days between the birth of Jesus Christ until the present day, it wouldn’t come close to totaling $800 billion.)  It was easy to see that the amount of debt being racked up by our government couldn’t be paid back for many generations of Americans.   Much of the future salaries of our kids’ would be going to new and ever-growing taxes to pay off this massive debt.

More deficit spending was occurring. This new government declared that their plan was to spend their way out of our economic slow down.  As Chicagoan Rick Santelli, a personality on CNBC,  showed off his anger on-air one day about the way government was doing things,  he spontaneously called for a nation-wide demonstration.  He called this a “Chicago Tea Party” after the Boston Tea Party.

So on Tax Day April 15, 2009 demonstrations against huge government spending were held all over the country including Salem, Illinois. People assembled peacefully but adamantly to protest the run up of government debt and their failure to stimulate job growth in the country.

What kind of people go to Tea Parties? We are people, for the most part, who have never demonstrated publicly before.  We are not racists or bigots. We didn’t protest in the sixties.  We range from Republicans to Democrats to Independents. We decided that  we’ve been politically silent long enough.  We have finally had it with the government ignoring our U.S. Constitution, the government grabbing more and more liberty and control from us citizens, the abusive governmental spending bills that ignored the peoples’ wishes, and being treated with contempt by the politicians we elected like our Illinois senators.  We don’t want to become a European Socialist state.  We want our economic freedom back.   The “change” that was promised in the last election is not what we want.  And if we had been told by the mainstream media that this was the kind of  “change” they had in mind, we wouldn’t have voted them in.  We want to restore our Constitution and the Republic.

What do we stand for? We stand for protecting our Constitution, restoring fiscal responsibility, constitutionally limited government in Washington, permanent repeal of all the recent tax hikes, a strong national defense, border security, and a balanced budget.

What do we reject? We reject Cap and Trade, Obamacare, run away government spending and earmarks, politicians who put their re-election above the country’s welfare, bailouts, dependence on foreign energy, increased government control, and exorbitant taxes.

Salem Tea Party Patriots