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.
I’d periodically been posting my own thoughts on the absurdities and obscenities of this administration, but you’re doing such a great job of it on a regular basis, that my own thoughts mostly just seem superfluous.
I did want to point you to another interesting piece, about the fact that /even/ if the tax cut did create the number of new jobs that the president maintains, it would still be negligible. Every other president since World War II has seen the country gain between 15,000 and 242,000 (the latter being during Clinton’s first term) jobs /per month/. In comparison, Bush’s administration has presided over an average of 69,000 jobs /LOST/ per month.
Katrina vanden Heuvel covers this in her editorial in The Nation at http://www.thenation.com/edcut/index.mhtml?pid=645 (scroll down to the piece entitled “Top Gun at Job Destruction”), referencing material provided by the International Association of Machinists at http://www.oraflcio.unions-america.com/ and a Daniel Gross article in Slate (http://slate.msn.com/id/2082321/).
From the Gross article:
“The good news for Bush is that with a base of 130 million jobs, adding 1.4 million in an 18-month period isn’t out of the ordinary. In fact, 1.4 million jobs would still be below average: Over the past 84 years, the economy typically adds nearly 2 million jobs every 18 months.
“The bad news for Bush is that even if the economy does add 2 million jobs by October 2004, he will still have presided over the only job-losing presidency since Hoover. And as Karl Rove surely knows, that name is never good company for a president seeking re-election. Since 1900, the only incumbent Republican presidents to lose second-term bids have been named Hoover and Bush.”
The manipulation of numbers is legion in the Bush administration. My favorite plain-language example is this: Bush claims that his tax cut will save taxpayers XXX billion. Well, if a homeless shelter has 10 people in it who’s net worth is $10, and Bill Gates walks in, then the net worth of that group explodes to billions. Yeah, the net savings is huge, but only for one guy.
I completely agree…I don’t understand how the American people are so ignorant to this administrations real intentions/lies. Im not going to rant on, because that would take too long, just had to note that I agreed, lol. AND the fact that less than half the population votes is absolutly disgusting. People in this country don’t CARE to make a difference, and this administration is especially good at secrecy and quietly keeping the people stupider. I have lost all hope for this country, and frankly until people get off their asses and DO something I could care less how corrupt it becomes (aside from congress- thats a lost cause already) because in a few years (after college) I plan on leaving it anyway. I hate Bush, but politicians are all the same – Kerry is the lesser of two evils, but I doubt he’ll win anyway.