By Mary Lyon, From The Left -- World News Trust
Question: What’s a scarier boogeyman than Osama bin Laden?
In the waning days of the midterm election campaign, increasingly desperate republi-CONS have found one last nightmare scenario. It’s not Iraq, not terrorism in general, not gays, not Democrats asleep at the switch while that congressional page pedophilia raged away (because naturally THAT one was the Democrats’ fault, too), and not only that we’re all gonna die if Democrats take the House. Nope. None of the above. It’s that old favorite GOP fallback that’s ALWAYS worse than bin Laden: the IRS. “Be afraid! Be VERY afraid! The Democrats are gonna raise yer TAXES!!!”
It’s ironic that the republi-CONS who claim they can keep everybody safer, and insist that tax cuts are the salvation of the Western world, have made us less safe in a large part BECAUSE of tax cuts. The historical trend before George Junior was for taxes to increase with the onslaught of war. After all, that war always had to be paid for, and it was typically a last-resort “extra” as opposed to the standard equipment war has become by now. We were more secure, overall, because we could afford stuff that taxes funded, whether it was guns for the soldiers or butter for the hungry. That was, of course, before the dawn of the Bush II Era, when our much-vaunted “MBA President” and his greedy, cheapskate cronies mismanaged us into a combined international AND fiduciary catastrophe.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m no fan of the tax man. Certainly I’d rather pay less in taxes than more. I’d rather pay less for anything than more. Anybody would. But there are obligations to face when you share an interest in a greater whole (“greater,” supposedly, in every sense of the word) like this nation and its present and future well-being. And as the “Democrats are gonna raise yer taxes!” scary stories are shouted at us from every conservative politician in the realm, that’s the one issue the Democrats have yet to hit back against. They’re finally showing backbone about the war, terrorism and national security, and even the moral issues that have been GOP bread-and-butter matters for ages. They’re fighting back on the “stay the course” flip flop, and against many of the dirtiest campaign commercials in memory. But they haven’t tackled the tax issue yet.
Just once, I’d like to see one of our guys stand up and explain exactly WHY it is that we have those annoying taxes to face, to begin with. Maybe they’re a necessary evil, but the word “necessary” comes before the word “evil” in this cliché for a reason. As Ronald Reagan came to power, fiendish thinkers like Newt Gingrich were already working it. He was the guy behind the “Wisdom of Chairman Newt” -– a nefarious little black book of catch phrases, slogans, and buzzwords to use as cheat-sheets for a kind of political “Mad-Lib” game. There was a list of good and positive words and phrases to be used whenever one spoke of anything conservative, reactionary, or Republican. There was a corresponding list of negatives for use to describe all things liberal, progressive, or Democratic. Taxes, as expected, got lumped into the bad group –- as in the term “tax RELIEF” -– implying that taxes were something you needed RELIEF from, ie: something bad. And because nobody’s ever tried to attack this general strategy head-on, that misrepresentation has been allowed to stand, unassailed, for almost three decades. Americans need some help connecting the dots, because taxes do not exist in a vacuum. Our Dems need to get specific and explain WHAT we pay those taxes FOR:
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