TEA TIME HAS ARRIVED

Antigovernment invective with some redeeming qualities.

Peters is mad as hell and not just about U.S. taxes. In TEA Time Has Arrived, he rails against what he perceives to be the governmental control of people’s lives. One must appreciate the sheer amount of effort put into this book. The author includes an extensive history in startling detail of two bills–HR-3997 and HR-1424–that ultimately became the “Emergency Economic Stimulus Act of 2008.” Peters then analyzes, with an appropriately jaundiced eye, the various aspects of the legislation. He discusses issues like health-care reform and global warming in similarly withering fashion. He relates the popularity of the April 2009 anti-tax “TEA Parties” to the American Revolution–an uprising caused in part, he says, because of unreasonable taxation: “The TEA parties (Taxed Enough Already) were not a protest against pay [sic] taxes. They were a protest against paying too many taxes, and the waste that is associated with the way tax dollars are spent, and the favoritism with which tax dollars are earmarked, and who they are earmarked towards.” Despite clunky writing, Peters gets his points across. Thankfully, the author also sees the black humor in the country’s crises. The “ratios” he has created for the government are amusingly accurate–the Corruption Ratio (“the corruption we know about divided by all the corruption that exists in government”), the Removal Ratio (“the number of elected officials that have been removed from office divided by the number of elected officials that should be removed from office”) and the Deception Ratio (“the government deception that we know about divided by all the government deception”). The book succeeds in offering a glimpse at the widespread anger and frustration surrounding the American government’s ineptitude.

An overlong but thorough personal diatribe.