Ending the Hidden Agenda Behind Tax Cuts

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 http://www.cognitivepolicyworks.com/what-we-do/cognitive-policy/">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):

http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/research/rockridge/why-voters-arent-motivated-by-a-laundry-list-of-positions-on-issues.1.html

1. Declare that the agenda is to "improve" public education
2. Pass legislation that cripples public schools
3. Cry out for "reform" when people see how bad our schools are doing
4. 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.

Much more: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/02/16-10

the ReRushicans want to privatize to ... I mean, how many ReRushican "philanthropists" are willing to pony up the money to fix the bridges?