Sciencegeek: if you are familiar with American history, you will know that the English rulers taxed tea and other commodities to "pay back" the cost of the French & Indian War that was fought in the colonies... giving rise to the cry "no taxation without representation" and eventually the American Revolution.

To get things a bit more in perspective:

Local land and poll taxes in America were set, collected and used by the American colonial authorities. Besides that, hardly anyone actually paid them, so in that respect the local land and poll taxation was used locally, by the local "representation"

There *were* taxes on tea, but these were mainly global taxes. Other commodities had also been taxed, but only for a short time from 1767 to 1770, when all but the tea tax were repealed because they were so unpopular.

There were 2 taxes on tea: tax on importing it to Britain; and tax on importing it to America (at a very modest 3 pence in the pound, or 1.25%).

The "Tea Party" came about NOT because of Americans' dissatisfaction with local or tea taxes, but because the British government REPEALED the taxes on landing tea in Britian to help out the East India Company and to try and shift its huge stockpile. They also took away the requirement that tea destined for America be first landed and auctioned in Britain before onward trans-shipment.

So tea taxes were lowered and this cut the bottom out from under the large coterie of Boston Smugglers who'd been doing very nicely by bringing untaxed tea into America from Holland, and marking it up in America by about half the British duty. The loss of this duty meant that the smugglers now only had the 1.25% differential of the American import duty between legitimate prices and their smuggled goods prices....not enough to make significant money on.

So they got pissed off and organised the Boston Tea Party as a protest against the British having *lowered* tea taxes. The BTP was therefore led by a bunch of criminals and greedy fast-buck artists, not by the idealistic freedom-lovers usually presented!!!