Tax cuts and propaganda

From Riverdaughter, yesterday:

They’re telling you that tax hikes kill jobs. Oh, really? How come they didn’t kill jobs in the 90′s when Clinton was president? And we’re not talking about all tax hikes, just the ones on the rich.

This reminds me of something I heard on a liberal cable news show -- Maddow's, I think -- the other day. I didn't record the exact words, but they were along these lines: "Barack Obama deserves credit for enacting the largest middle class tax cut in history. That was the stimulus."

Credit...?

Well, I'm glad that someone else finally said it out loud: The stimulus was not a Keynesian job creation bill; rather, it was (to a large degree) a tax cut bill. So how can we say that Obama deserves credit? He simply proved that tax cuts don't work.

In 2008, Bush got his own "stimulus" package through -- a package that everyone now forgets. That too was a tax cut. The lesson: Tax cuts don't work.

Does Obama deserve credit for repeating Bush's mistake?

In recent times, there has been much debate as to whether Obama's sell-out of progressive principles stems from an innate conservatism or a blundering ineptitude. But in the end, is the question so very important? The result is what counts.

The more interesting question is whether a "good" Obama -- an Obama who more closely resembled the progressive that that Kos Kids thought they were voting for -- would have been able to accomplish anything worthwhile. Probably not.

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our political superstars, but in ourselves, that we are propaganda's underlings.

Even a hypothesized "Obama the Good" might have gone the tax cut route, because tax cuts are easy to sell to Congress. The public has been incessantly brainwashed into believing that tax cuts create employment, even though there is no evidence for that notion. In 2008, we should have raised taxes on the wealthy and then use the money to create jobs. Obama the Bad (the actually existing Obama) did not do so. But even our imagined Obama the Good could not have accomplished that goal.

Politically, he would not have been able to get in front the cameras in order to tell the public: "I'm not going to lower taxes to restart the economy because tax cuts don't work. It would be irresponsible to raise taxes now. We're running such huge debts because we fought wars without paying for them."

What's killing us is not our leadership. It's the brainwashing.

Proof: Most Americans don't know that Obama enacted the largest middle-class tax cut in history. In fact, in a poll of tea party members...

Sixty-four percent believe that the president has increased taxes for most Americans, despite the fact that the vast majority of Americans got a tax cut under the Obama administration. Thirty-four percent of the general public says the president has raised taxes on most Americans.

A proposal: I'd like to see a Constitutional amendment stipulating that America cannot go to war unless a steeply progressive tax is imposed to pay for the costs. We'd have peace for generations.