Every stage illusionist and politician knows that success requires being adept at misdirection. With stage magicians, it’s as simple as getting the audience to look at the hand doing nothing while the object in question is being manipulated with the other hand. The magician misdirects the audience’s attention to the hand doing nothing.
In politics, it’s even simpler: “Hey, dumbass, look at that scary thing over there; it’s going to get you,” is usually sufficient to misdirect our attention so he can perform that which he doesn’t want us to see (which is almost always some sort of reaming of the citizenry).
Sometimes, when the timing is impeccable, the political misdirection works. Usually, the politicians that have been in office the longest are the best at misdirection, if only because they get so much practice. This is what happened with the USA Patriot Act, signed into law by President Bush last week.
Most of the time, however, something goes wrong with the misdirection. This is clearly what happened with the economic stimulus package that the U.S. House of Representatives passed last week. The House Republicans dropped so many of the balls associated with this boondoggle that even the most conservative of observers were calling it war profiteering.
Arianna Huffington, one of the foremost cheerleaders of the American Right summed it up nicely:
“Let history record that, after Sept. 11, our leaders brought the nation together and decided to fight the war on terrorism by making business lunches fully tax-deductible and levying no taxes on corporate profits patriotically funneled off shore. Call it Operation Enduring Avarice.”
The heart of the bill calls for the retroactive elimination of the corporate alternative minimum tax coupled with a 10% cut in the capital gains tax. Despite what the libertarians say, the capital gains tax is paid predominantly by the rich, on investments held for less than a year. But that’s chump change compared to the retroactive elimination of the corporate alternative minimum tax, which would result in US$25 billion in corporate rebates to the likes of IBM (US$1.4 billion), General Motors (US$833 million), and General Electric (US$671 million).
The Republicans insist that we need these tax cuts to stimulate the economy, because the last round of tax cuts designed to stimulate the economy didn’t. Corporations will use the tax cuts to create new jobs. Sure they will; just like the airlines used their US$15 billion bailout to create all those new jobs (the current layoff tally from the airline fiasco is hovering somewhere around 140,000 and it’s clear they’re not done yet).
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