The New York Times Returns to Mindlessly Advocating Tax Hikes: Propaganda Lesson #50,001.

True to form, the NYT routinely discovers new and novel new ways to advocate tax hikes. We have never seen them sway from this fastidious well-excavated political posture. No matter what happens in the economy, there are always numerous first-rate reasons to raise taxes. There is always a cornucopia of liberal raison d'être to gouge the taxpayer in the name of fairness or for other urgent needs and today the impending recession becomes the handy excuse. Hillary and others routinely propose punitive taxes on companies such as Exxon and hold corporations, the generators of almost all jobs and revenues in contempt. That massive tax will presumable not affect the price of oil. A good hefty tax hike will save our economy!

In our current turn of the rusty, old propaganda sausage machine from the New York Times, aka the Walter Duranty Papers, we revert back to the old stale groove and revisit proper propaganda techniques and relearn the eternal leftist precept that taxes will have to be raised in any and all scenarios. We learn in the current digest from the Times that there is some transition from hype to fear as the title reminds us, and provides some historical substance and a final conclusion as usual: The approved article From Hype to Fear[1]  gives us the ugly facts:

“It’s the latest piece of bad news about an economy in which the employment situation has actually been deteriorating for the past year. It’s no longer possible to hope that the effects of the housing slump will remain “contained,” as one of 2007’s buzzwords had it. The levees have been breached, and the repercussions of the housing crisis are spreading across the economy as a whole.” [note: the emphasis mine here and all underlined words in quotes that follow].[2]

These can all be handily fixed up with higher taxes.  Let us work on this puzzle a piece at a time starting with jobs.[3] We learn that the tentative rise in unemployment is a mere 0.3% to a provisional 5%, one of the lowest unemployment rates since 1900. A level of 5% is considered full employment by most economists unless they are grubbing for new ways to criticize the wild successes of capitalism over socialism or pump the tax revenues for new social programs.

President Bush comments:

“This economy of ours is on a solid foundation, but we can’t take economic growth for granted,” Bush said Friday. “And there are signs that will cause us to be ever more diligent and make sure that good policies come out of Washington.”[4]

By ‘good policies’ we must wonder if tax cuts were mostly responsible for this full employment. We can then wonder if the opposite of tax cuts would cause the reverse effect. But, all this great growth is really an illusion as we learn from Paul Krugman, the prime director of the Tax Hikes Cure Everything Theory in North America:

“But what is clear is that 2008 will be a troubled year for the U.S. economy — and that as a result, the overall economic record of the Bush years will have been dreary at best: two and a half years of slumping employment, three and a half years of good but not great growth, and two more years of renewed economic distress.[5]

We have had a horrible economy under Bush! I didn’t realize that. Should I vote for Hillary?

It seems that our dedicated economics ring master from the Times is not unanimous in his assessment of how taxes affect the economy as Lawrence Kudlow[6]  and other genuine economists have predicted the benefits of tax cuts for years. The Reagan tax cuts can be seen to correspond with the phenomenal rise in the S&P 500, facts that must have been kept from our author for decades.

What can be the error here?? Either tax cuts will help the economy or not we can ask! The simple answer to this conundrum is mired in propaganda and politics. The leftists have been crushed by capitalism at home and abroad and their only path to power is to use your tax monies to buy votes. We can learn much from the morally, intellectually and financially bankrupt Salon.com where the Politics Thread [on the chat room TableTalk] has been running for years: The Worst Job Market Since the Great Depression [7] . This Thread started Sep 10, 2004 and posts now number 8182. This is the second thread on this topic, replacing another that was started in 2003[8] and one before that. These two threads account for about 25,000 moans and groans. I cannot find a single case where some dedicated leftist has called for a tax cut in my 12 years on TableTalk. The lefties whimper over every conceivable change in any number remotely related to economics and/or commerce (and especially profits) and shout ‘gotcha now!’ Krugman dutifully follows the hysteria and groans of  this mob with his short stack of political clichés and grinds out yet another propaganda piece that proves high taxes are a benefit to society.

The ideal propagandist sets up some inevitably horrible event and then lets loose a torrent of emotions and sobs with phony accounts of the three prior decades of failure with this scripted piece that Bernard Shaw would applaud:

“You see, for 30 years American politics has been dominated by a political movement practicing Robin-Hood-in-reverse, giving unto those that hath while taking from those who don’t.”[9]

This is so sophomoric that we blush at the contemptible fallacies of this propagandistic whiner. This phony theory, the only tax message the Times has ever espoused, is related to the debunked zero sum theory.[10] That heartlessly states that if somebody in the US spends or invests some money that was not taxed by the rabid left then somebody in Katanga Province in the Congo or elsewhere will go without food or medical care as a result.

The hated Bush now cuts into the only hope the NYT has for maintaining is money grubbing policy:

“President Bush is warning that given the economy’s problems, “the worst thing the Congress could do is raise taxes on the American people and on American businesses.”[11]

Zap!

And this gets us to the bottom line: the facts matter not a whit in politics and the mission of the economic Sooth Sayers on the staff of the NYT is to find new ways to spin their discredited message about taxes.

We have to congratulate Krugman for another sterling example of economic propaganda. This fine piece is a text book example and should be bookmarked for reference. But, hang on liberals and radicals who believe in the NYT as being objective or sometimes fair as both Obama and Clinton are dedicated tax whores. All is not lost yet.

rycK

Comments: ryckki@gmail.com