From Truthdig, courtesy of RJ Matson (The St. Louis Post Dispatch).
Not much to add here, but something does occur to me. The tax cut maniacs are single issue obsessives for the simplest of reasons: tax cuts don’t work. Lest that sound too cute by half, or like I’m invoking some Orwellian doublespeak, it’s much less complicated (and more insidious) than that. This mantra (that tax cuts spread wealth, create jobs, and stimulate er…the economy) has proven to be patently false, often, in spectacular fashion. First during the Reagan years, and now during the Bush catastrophe. Indeed, even now it is screaming out its impotence right before our foreclosed eyes. But here’s the rub (literally): the folks who propagate this myth and define this debate (the ones with actual power, not the millions of beguiled True Believers who continue to blame the government instead of the scheming autopilots who intentionally debase it) have little to lose and quite a bit to gain. Put simply: these folks are not merely shameless and without souls, they are also remarkably shrewd. It’s not that they actually believe increased and unceasing tax cuts, particularly for the wealthiest percentile, are viable in any demonstrable way; it’s precisely the ways they fail as a strategy that makes for such a win/win proposition.
Check it out: in the short-term, tax cuts put more money in your pocket. Well, at least if you’re wealthy. And the wealthier you are, the more money you get. See? The other folks, not so much. Sure, it seems swell to get that extra few hundred bucks, but those Benjamins are not going too far when, at the same time, your health care premiums have doubled. Or additional benefits are cut at work. Or your credit card interest rate is jacked up. Get the piture? But here’s the ugly beauty: these cretins know it will cause the economy to bloat, then implode. And that’s usually the time a Democrat gets called in to clean up the mess (see: Carter, Jimmy; Clinton, Bill and Obama, Barack). The more indebted the U.S. is, the more government programs get cut, and the less efficient government is as a result. So that Republicans can point and say “See? We keep trying to explain that the big, bad government isn’t going to help you; and do you want these inefficient programs taking hard-earned money out of your pockets?” And the cycle continues again.
The spin always outperforms the true story. We’ve seen it before (there were people, then, and there are actually people, now, blaming FDR for making government too intrusive; there are people, discussed here recently, who point to the “Reagan Revolution” as a time when the free market prevailed and prosperity abounded, despite all annoying evidence to the contrary), and we’ll see it again. In fact, we are already getting a taste: listen to the blowhards bitching about the Big G (Government); nevermind that the size of government increased the last 8 years.
Look: politicians of either party will always be politicians, and to a certain extent, people are people, no matter who they vote for or what they believe (because the bottom line is, the overwhelming majority of us have to work and pay bills and our taxes are non-negotiable). Or to put it less kindly, we are all of us sheep, hoping the grass in our pen doesn’t stop growing. And that’s the way it’s always been, so there’s nothing really to begrudge: it takes people to make a democracy, after all (like, literally: no matter how mendacious or benevolent the party in power at a particular time, without the citizens, and our taxes, our labor and our consensus, we glide right past aristocracy and into oblivion). The only folks we can, and should, reserve our contempt for are the relative handful actually in power, often scheming behind the scenes: the ones who can make or break lives with the policies or decisions they implement; the ones fully aware how much their temporal and short-sighed intentions affect innocent lives. Those are the ones for whom we should break out the tar and the feathers.
