“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.

In a story about Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder and head of the Tea Party Patriots, Martin recalls her recent bankruptcy. She and her husband somehow managed to end up owing $500,000 to the IRS after their company failed. Martin is not an evil person; her story is just, well, a bit sad. She is indeed a wellspring for that odd tea party message of anti-government self-reliance even while availing oneself of the safety net the government provides, the muddled indignation at the thought of having to pay taxes for other people's safety net coupled with the blithe assumption that the same safety net will of course be there for you if you need it. Filing for bankruptcy to avoid $500,000 in back taxes is a pretty damn good bailout. It's a reasonable bailout, mind you—we have decided that allowing the option of bankruptcy is both humane and more sensible economically than consigning someone to a lifetime of debt slavery—but it's a bailout. That's $500,000 that the rest of America's taxpayers are going to have to shell out themselves in order to make up the slack.

But I think we figured out why Jenny Beth Martin devoted herself to the notion that taxes are bad. Don't need a Dr. Keith Ablow to weigh in on this one.



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.”

Translation: We of course used the good kind of safety net, the one that good people use. You can tell that it's the good kind because we felt humiliated by having to use it. Now let's go form an organization founded on the idea that we shouldn't have to pay, say, $500,000 in taxes in order to fund that very same safety net.

Please read below the fold for more on this story.