Answer

This is the reason why I asked the question the other day:

The estimated value of the tea in the Boston Tea Party is one million dollars in current funds

9. The financial loss was significant.
It’s estimated that the protestors tossed more than 92,000 pounds of tea into Boston Harbor. That’s enough to fill 18.5 million teabags. The present-day value of the destroyed tea has been estimated at around $1 million.

(source).

Actually, I'm going to quote some of the rest of that:

The Tea Act was a government bailout for a company on the brink of financial collapse, the flailing East India Company, which was deemed to be, in modern terms, “too big to fail.” The legislation gave the East India Company a virtual monopoly on the American tea trade, allowing it to bypass colonial merchants as middlemen and to even undercut the price of smuggled Dutch tea, which was widely consumed in the colonies. Thus, the Tea Act directly threatened the vested commercial interests of Boston’s wealthy merchants and smugglers, such as John Hancock, who fomented the revolt.

In other words, the actual tea partiers had a lot more in common with the occupy people than they do with people who wish to claim their mantle.

In fact, the real issue was more like a corporate subsidy than an actual tax, but the ultimate issue was local decision making ("no taxation without representation").

Many Americans  viewed the Boston Tea Party as an act of vandalism by radicals rather than a heroic patriotic undertaking. People held that private property was sacred and that the vandals should compensate the property owners, in this case, the British East India Company.