Take Note, Teabaggers.

From that notoriously liberal rag, The Wall Street Journal:

Anyone who takes tea with friends will tell you: The parties are painless. It's the gossip that hurts.

In the same way, today's antitax, antispending movements aren't the problem, it's the dangerous misconceptions they spread about the government response to the financial crisis.

Their argument -- that huge tax hikes are coming or have been implemented to pay off bailouts for banking fat cats -- betrays a lack of understanding of the government's approach to solving the financial crisis. When protesters or critics complain about the $10 trillion-plus spent on the Wall Street bailout, you can understand how their estimates of the number of protesters in the streets last week were slightly, well, inflated.

The truth: No one's paying new taxes directly related to the bailout. And most of the government rescue packages offered to the banks have gone untapped or are being repaid.

It doesn't take a lot of checking to confirm this. ProPublica, the investigative journalism site, thoroughly tracks the multiple government programs and has filled in the blanks for many programs that are less than transparent. (Or, if you're on the go and want your bailouts simply illustrated, there's a cool little iPhone application called BailoutWatch that monitors more than two dozen government programs, such as the $245 billion Citigroup Inc. loan-loss provision and the $80 billion Credit Union Deposit Insurance Guarantee program.) ...

If the economy does recover within a year, we'll have spent a lot to rescue the financial system, but nowhere close to the 14-digit figure flogged by tea party protesters. ...

Our national debt already stands at $11 trillion. Most of that debt was run up in the last eight years, when government spending outpaced declining tax revenues. The Iraq war is close to costing the nation $1 trillion. Hurricane Katrina cost us about $110 billion.

We ran up a huge tab for our kids well before the bailout, but it's unlikely that such an inconvenient fact will be the talk of the next tea party.

Hehindeedy!