Hundreds of residents converged on Carrollton City Hall Wednesday afternoon to protest what they consider rampant federal taxation and out-of-control government spending.

The demonstration focused on the hope that Washington will take a hard look at the essential functions of government and cut the cash flow for everything else.

As part of a nationwide tax day TEA Party campaign ” standing for “taxed enough already” ” the event in downtown Carrollton featured a series of speakers and culminated in a march down Bradley Street to the county courthouse. Similar events across the country were coordinated on a community-by-community basis and billed as grass-roots campaigns, but like those gatherings, the goal of the local demonstration stretched far beyond city or county policy.

“The goal is to raise awareness, let our voices be heard, let people know that instead of sitting around the water cooler at work venting, we’re out here showing our elected officials we’re not going to stand for it,” said Kristen Gerspacher, a resident of Bremen. “We are taxed to death, and I think you cannot solve a debt crisis by spending and printing more money. We’re headed toward extraordinary inflation, and we’re digging ourselves even deeper.”

The recent federal bailouts of the banking and automotive sectors under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama totaling well over $1 trillion was flagged by protestors as a marker of reckless and wasteful government spending that will lead to unparalleled inflation for generations to come.

“We see this tremendous amount of spending, out of control, and nobody is answering for it. They can’t explain where the money is going, and it’s my grandkids’ (debt). It’s your kids’, it’s your kids’ kids. They’re going to pay for this,” said Terry Agne, chairman of the Carroll County Republican Party. “They’re borrowing from the next generation to pay for what the previous generation has done, and sooner or later, they’re going to lose everything, and that’s when socialism and fascism kicks in, and I’m not willing to get rid of my rights as an American citizen.”

It’s even more upsetting, said Rep. Mark Butler, R-Carrollton, that at a time when family budgets are strained to the limit, governments aren’t making the necessary sacrifices themselves, instead passing the burden back onto the taxpayer. Instead of tax hikes, the solution is for the government to simply cut unnecessary spending, he said.

“You start dealing with all these bureaucrats in Washington, and all they think is, ‘No, no. You can’t take our money.’ Everybody out here in this crowd has lost money but for some reason the government thinks it’s the only entity on the planet that doesn’t need to make any sacrifices,” Butler said. “With revenues down, it’s the perfect opportunity to cut down on these wasteful programs. We can basically start strangling them on the vine. You stop watering them, you stop funding them, and they don’t grow. We have to understand that you’re not going to tax your way into prosperity. That’s just not how it should work.”

Wednesday’s protests mark the first step toward taking the power back from the federal government, said Rep. Tim Bearden, R-Villa Rica. For decades now, he said, the powers granted to the states in the U.S. Constitution have wilted as Washington has performed a slow power grab, steadily seizing authority from the states.

“It’s been going on for years, the slow degrading of our rights. It’s important to get back to the Constitution, the founding principles ... of less government. It’s time to get that back in order,” he said. “It shows that the people are really getting back involved in their government. The government doesn’t have a people. The people have a government.”

There may come a day that future generations will look back at the TEA Party protests and see the watermark of a great revolution, the moment when the people stood up and said, “enough,” said Mark Miller, founding dean of the University of West Georgia Richards College of Business and a Carrollton resident.

“We have gone so far in terms of government spending, government waste, pork and dealing with constituencies in other countries,” Miller said. “There’s got to be a stop to this. We’ve got to turn it back. We’ve got to decrease our federal budget and turn power back to the states. We need to be taking care of ourselves, and it needs to start now.”