On Good Morning America today George Stephanopoulis interviewed teabagger Republican Michelle Bachman of Minnesota, and asked her how she can support extending tax cuts for the wealthy while opposing extending unemployment benefits.Ignoring the back half of the two-part question, she replied (in part) “This is a job killer if we raise taxes on the job creators.”
Bachmann is not lying, but expressing a Platonic philosophy like a lot of Republicans do, which relies heavily on theory. Tax cuts for wealthy people always create jobs -- that's supply-side theory, which is always true. If you introduce her to evidence that contradicts the theory, it must be the wrong evidence.
Anyway, evidence doesn't matter that much, since conclusions in Platonic thought are drawn philosophically speaking on an a priori basis, from pure logic unsullied by messy "things," rather than proceeding a posteriori and drawing conclusions after examining tangible evidence.
Tax cuts for the well-heeled produce prosperity, the markets are self-correcting, and the essence of the bread is transubstantiated into the body of Our Savior, even though the evidence (i.e., the outward appearance and physical attributes) of the bread itself doesn't change.
The messy "accidents" of the real economy -- unemployment, lack of demand. deflation -- have nothing to do with Platonic theories, which are drawn from spotless models cooked up by high-priest economists in ivory towers, models which are unspoiled by contact with the degraded economics we have to deal with here on earth.
Of course, you can demolish that silly theory of hers into a chaos of disoriented atoms by simply asking why the country has lost millions of jobs since the Bush tax cuts for the superrich were enacted nine years ago. But I doubt Michelle would waste any time worrying about such mundane considerations as what's happened to the actual lives of millions of actual people. She lives on a much more refined and elevated plane -- the plane of theoretical oligarchic self-righteous self-justification. Don't even try using evidence; she's got her a priori stuck way up her a posteriori.
Hypocrisy is the greatest luxury -- raise the double standard (Mike Franti).
In theory, theory and practice are always the same, but in practice they're always different (Yogi Berra).
Photo: gold casket cover for the Egyptian general and high priest Wendjebauendjed, 21st Dynasty, about 1050 BCE
1 comment:
Indeed. Creating jobs taken on faith if tax cuts are given to the rich vs. just taking tax money and creating jobs. Faith in free market to do it vs. just creating jobs outright. That the free market is theoretically able to be more productive depends on mass psychology, ie., a mass mental state. We can train ourselves to have a positive mental state with government running things just as well as companies doing so since it is mental mass training.
So, why don't we just do it with socialism rather than companyism? Because individuals can't satisfy greediness when the fruits of their labor go into a common pool to benefit all rather than just themselves, and we know we have plutocracy.
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