Why have people become so stupid?

Posted on May 13, 2003 by Gene

I will say one thing for the Bush administration: they are master manipulators. Every day I stand mouth agape at the latest fish story they have managed to get the American people to believe. The majority of Americans think that Saddam Hussein was behind the September 11 attacks, despite all the evidence to the contrary. How did the neoconservatives manage this? Our economy is in tatters. We had the largest surplus in history before Bush took over, and now we are facing the largest deficit in history. But he has an incredibly high approval rating. Huh? He invaded another country under a dozen different pretexts, none of which holds up under scrutiny – especially the one about weapons of mass destruction. Now they cheerfully admit that they don’t expect to find any, but the American people don’t seem to care. And the incredible tax cut juggernaut continues: (from the Washington Post)

Bush took another preemptive strike yesterday during a speech in Albuquerque when he told a small-business audience, “Oh, you’ll hear the talk about how this plan only helps the rich people. That’s just typical Washington, D.C., political rhetoric, is what that is. That’s just empty rhetoric.”

But much of the rhetoric on the issue has actually been the president’s — and polls suggest it has worked.

… Peter R. Orszag, a Brookings Institution economist and critic of White House tax policy, gave Bush credit for what he called “a spin job” that used selective examples of lower-income families to convince many lower- and middle-income Americans that they have a stake in the tax cut’s passage. Last week, a USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll found that 52 percent of Americans now think the tax cuts are “a good idea,” an increase of 10 percentage points in two weeks.

That gain is all the more remarkable because the president’s original $726 billion tax cut plan — and the smaller versions that passed the House and are under consideration in the Senate — clearly do favor the affluent.

Under Bush’s original proposal, households with $40,000 to $50,000 in taxable income would receive an average tax cut of $482 and a boost of 1.2 percent to their total after-tax income. For households earning more than $1 million, the average tax cut would be more than $89,500, with an increase in their after-tax income of 4.2 percent, according to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.
Bush rammed through a $1 trillion tax cut in 2001. Remember? You might have received a check for $300, but other than that, do you notice any difference? Do you have more money? Has it stimulated the economy? No! It increased the deficit and made it worse. So naturally, cutting taxes on the richest people will make everything better.
C’mon, people. Why do you believe this man? Do you learn nothing from history? I’m sure people believed such luminous “leaders” as Mussolini, Stalin, and Hussein as well. George Bush may not be of the same caliber of evil as these men, but he is working in their direction slowly but surely with the steady dismantling of American freedoms and raping of the economy to cement the wealth of the top 1% of this country.
Stop being a sheep. Open your eyes and look at the numbers. Remember what candidate canned the term “fuzzy math.”

More about Bush’s “little lies” in E.J. Dionne’s column today:

Consider this paragraph from the New York Times on May 7 about that already legendary Bush-in-a-flight-suit moment. “The White House said today that President Bush traveled to the carrier Abraham Lincoln last week on a small plane because he wanted to experience a landing the way carrier pilots do, not because the ship would be too far out to sea for Mr. Bush to arrive by helicopter, as his spokesman had originally maintained.”

Now that’s very interesting. You can be absolutely sure that if an Al Gore White House had comparably misled citizens about the reason for a presidential made-for-television visit to an aircraft carrier, Gore would have been pilloried for engaging in yet another “little lie.”

…Then there’s the president’s claim that his dividend tax cut is about creating jobs in a sluggish economy.

Even supporters of the dividend tax cut acknowledge it will do little in the short term to create jobs. As John Cassidy noted recently in the New Yorker, if you take the president’s statements at face value, each new job created by his tax cut would cost the government $550,000 in lost revenue. That, Cassidy noted dryly, is “about 17 times the salary of the average American worker.”
Now we see the reasons that Republicans claim to support education but cut funding – or promote private religious schools. The stupider our populace becomes, the less likely they are to challenge conservative claims, arithmetic, and machinations.