Tea partiers clueless about tax policy (among, of course, other things)

Bruce Bartlett - former Reagan advisor and Treasury official during the George HW Bush administration - offers "The Misinformed Tea Party Movement/For an antitax group, they don't know much about taxes" (link):

On March 16 the Tea Party crowd showed up for yet another demonstration on Capitol Hill in Washington. Curious about the factual knowledge these people have regarding the issues they are protesting, my friend David Frum enlisted some interns to interview as many Tea Partyers as possible on a couple of basic questions. They got 57 responses--a pretty good-sized sample from a crowd that numbered between 300 and 500 people...

...Tuesday's Tea Party crowd, however, thought that federal taxes were almost three times as high as they actually are. The average response was 42% of GDP and the median 40%. The highest figure recorded in all of American history was half those figures: 20.9% at the peak of World War II in 1944...

Much more at the link, and expect at least some in the tea parties (our extensive coverage at that link) to call him a socialist Communist Marxist-Leninist Trotskyite because, well, that's what they do.