Ending the Hidden Agenda Behind Tax Cuts

[Joanne98]

By Joe Brewer

February 16, 2009 "CommonDreams" -- -Something as simple as a metaphor can mean the difference between shared prosperity and widespread suffering.

It's time to tell the truth about tax cuts. This phrase dominates political discourse and is coughed out every time a conservative public figure opens his mouth. It is treated like the basis of sound reasoning, yet no one points out what should be obvious - that "tax relief" and "tax cuts" are just code words for destroying the capacity of government to serve the public.

We've heard over and over again that the source of society's problems is the government. The solution that follows is to "trim the fat", "cut out the waste", "shrink the government", and provide "relief" to millions of citizens who suffer the burden of exploitation by Washington elites. This story flies in the face of the facts, yet it makes sense to a significant portion of the U.S. population. How can this be?

The answer has to do with how we make sense of things in the world. Our experiences shape what seems legitimate by reinforcing (or undermining) our ideas about the way things work. So, for example, a progressive politician may speak honestly and forcefully about the positive role of government in our lives. But this will fall on deaf ears if our typical experience is at odds with such claims. This observation demonstrates a key element of what George Lakoff and I have dubbed the Cognitive Criterion for Public Support:

An effective policy must be popular if it is to stand the test of time and it must be popular for the right reasons, namely because it promotes the right long-term values in the minds of citizens, reinforced through the lived experience.

The reason many people accept conservative claims about taxation and government is that they hold up for many common experiences, especially when conservatives are in control of the government. Conservative officials enact policies that make life worse for people while claiming that things will get better. Then they draw upon these negative experiences to advance their agenda. No Child Left Behind is an excellent example. The strategy works like this (a more detailed analysis can be found here):

Declare that the agenda is to "improve" public education
Pass legislation that cripples public schools
Cry out for "reform" when people see how bad our schools are doing
Get rid of public schools and replace them with private schools, especially schools that teach conservative ideology (e.g. elite charter schools, religious schools, etc.)
This strategy demonstrates how cognitive policy works. Emphasis is given to how people understand what is happening. The goal is to ensure that our experiences are interpreted through a conservative lens. It is not literally the case that taxation is a burden (a provocative metaphor), but rather that our common sense is influenced by a combination of our experiences in the world and the interpretive filters that give them meaning. (A key feature of how the political mind works, as I discuss in The Great Political Blind Spot)

Back to the hidden agenda behind tax cuts, we can apply this insight to see that conservatives want people to have negative experiences with government. Why? Because it supports decades of propaganda - and an underlying belief that stems from their worldview - that government is the problem. In the early 1970's, conservative elites started investing heavily in the creation of idea factories to spread their views far and wide so that they eventually became the new common sense of our culture. They had to work tirelessly for years to change the underlying values of American citizens because our long history has been devoted to advancing our most cherished values, which happen to be progressive. But, as we can see by the pervasiveness of their ideas today, this effort has been catastrophically successful.

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22008.htm

[liberal N proud]

1. Tax cuts reduces the funding for government thus forcing smaller government

Makes perfect GOP sense.

They would cut down the tree claiming it would save the leaves.

[patriotvoice]

2. And there is nothing wrong with smaller government, per se.

The government simply has to be large enough to effectively handle common-wealth enterprises that would falter or stranglehold the population if run solely under free enterprise without coordinated regulation. Furthermore, the government should be more flexible and "liberal" the higher up you go: the Federal government must be the most liberal, while city governments may be more "conservative".

[Peace Patriot]

3. It's kind of like slaughtering a million people to bring them "freedom and democracy,"

as our fuckwad fascists did in Iraq. The real goal is to steal their oil, and to tool up the U.S. war machine for corporate resource wars. The flak P.R. is simplistic bullshit--mere false narrative cover for mind-boggling theft of every kind.

"Tax cuts" are for stealing the public blind, for the rich not paying their fair share, for destroying all the most decent features of our society--all our common good initiatives--the public school system, public libraries, public parks, public universities, emergency services, Social Security, unemployment insurance, et al. The rich want to exploit the poor with no impediments, and no responsibility for the weak, the sick, the young, the elderly, the powerless, or for society in general. They don't even want to pay for their goddamn wars. They are socio-paths. They furthermore, in the 1980s, re-wrote the tax code so that it takes ridiculously high bites out of the income of the poor, and lets billionaires off the hook. And they sell this--"tax cuts"--as "freedom," as somehow part of the "American Dream," and as "relief" to those poor and middle-class wage-earners and small business people who are bearing an unfair tax burden, because that's how the fascists arranged things.

It is perverse and psychotic.

This is an excellent analysis of this fascist psychosis. But we need to do more than understand their false narratives, and educate ourselves and others about all the money (largely our money) that has gone into buying up vast 'news'/opinion monopolies to push this tripe 24/7 on our public airwaves as well as in print, and the rightwing 'think tank' money (also largely our money--that is, money stolen from us by "tax cuts" for the rich, from gouging and cheating consumers, etc.) for devising these lies, and the money (yet again, largely our money) infused into our filthy campaign contribution system to buy politicians to spout this self-serving narrative.

We have to find the way to restore the PRACTICAL power of the people in our democracy. The actual mechanics of power is vested in the voting system itself, and guess who owns and controls the 'TRADE SECRET' programming code on which our voting system is now entirely run? A handful of rightwing, Bushite corporations!

I appreciate George Lackoff's work in disentangling these 3 to 4 decades of twisted fascist lies that have been rammed down peoples' throats. It is a great service to us all. But, as I do with all political analysis, I have to bring up the PRACTICAL aspect of power, because it is so neglected. What good does it do to understand the barrage of twisted lies on TV and in most media if Bushwhacks control the voting system with privately owned, 'TRADE SECRET' code, and virtually no audit/recount controls?

We should be asking how to change this. The corpo/fascists who control the public airwaves aren't going to give way to fairness any time soon if we don't have the practical power to throw their asshole politicians out of office. How do we get that power back? It appears to me that it can't be done at the Congressional level. Half of Congress was not elected, in my opinion--and even the better Democrats (most of them) are dirty on private, 'TRADE SECRET,' electronic voting systems. I think the state/local level is the most hopeful, and will require a massive grass roots citizen movement.

[classysassy]

4. 100% correct