Awww, just how dumb
are we, Part I?
Poor Joe
Tarica. His Sunday Tribune column really
stepped in it on Sunday. True, he took
some unwarranted swipes at people in the Central Valley,
for which he was rightly chastised, but his column primarily focused on the cigarette-taxing
Proposition 29, which proposition tanked because of a terrific campaign by the
tobacco companies. A lot of
letter-to-the-editor writers took umbrage and wrote in. But their letters, for the most part,
illustrated just how terrific the tobacco companies’ campaign had been.
The Tobacco
Boys ran a barrage of ads that paired the words “taxes,” and
“bureaucrats/government,” with the winning tag-line, . . . we don’t need more taxes. . . Oooo, those are guaranteed winning
words in this tax and government/bureaucracy-hating political climate and sure
enough, the brains of millions knee-jerked and their fingers went right to the
“NO!” box on the ballot.
Brilliant. Especially the use of the “we,” like it’s
just us poor freedom-loving citizens against those evil taxers, those evil
bureaucrats, forgetting that the vast majority of those “we’s” don’t smoke so
would be totally unaffected by the tax.
Nope. Just the thought of the
word “tax” was enough.
Never mind
the point of the tax, or whether it might benefit smokers, or deter them. Nope.
A tax is a tax is a tax and even the threat of a tax on some other guy
is somehow translated by our already-primed brains into a tax on me. And the letters to the editor showed just how
effective Big Tobacco’s strategy had been as they parroted it back. Said Denny Barringer, “It was
an unjust tax. It targeted the already
burdened. It made no sense. It wasn’t about making people quit smoking –
it was about bureaucracy.”
Ah, yes,
“bureaucracy.” Never mind that it was also about making people quit or never
start – price points have a tendency to also be tipping points that can change
behavior. And never mind “unjust.” All
taxes can be viewed as “unjust.” Right
now, polls show that the vast majority of Americans support the idea of
“unjustly” raising taxes on millionaires.
That’s as “unfair” as slapping a buck on a pack of smokes.
No. Logic had nothing to do with what happens in
the lizard brain. And ours have been
carefully primed for years to view taxes as evil, the government as evil and
bureaucrats (i.e. anybody who works for the government, even those who provide
vital services to the taxpayers) as evil.
So, simply pair those two hot buttons in a primed brain, toss in the
“We” to create the false sense that we’re somehow part of what’s being
proposed, and there you have it: Guaranteed crash and burn.
Ah, those
Tobacco Boys know what they’re doing!
Awww, Just how dumb
are we, Part II
The Tribune’s been running a series about
the plight of our schools. They’re
broke. Classes are cut to the bone,
things like art and music are tossed out the door. Parents have to hold bake sales to even have
a hope of getting their kids a decent education.
Awwww, too
bad. Now, can we please parse this
problem? Taxes are the price we pay for
things we want. Clearly, for years and
years, nobody wanted educated kids. They
couldn’t possibly have felt that was important because they refused to vote to
tax themselves so they could have decent schools. (And the schools themselves refused to deal
with their own problems of waste and mismanagement and bad teachers.) Instead, the constant mantra was (here it is
again) the school “bureaucracy” is wasteful, those rich, fat, “bureaucratic” unionized,
money-grubbing teachers are earning too much money, the kids don’t need any
“frills,” we don’t need to raise taxes to pay for any of this. We need to privatize schools, make them more
competitive, bust the teacher’s unions, race those wages to the bottom, turn
schools into a for-profit business.
The result
you can see. Failing public schools,
poorly educated kids, parents out selling brownies. Pathetic.
But you get what you pay for and clearly, as a nation, we ain’t paying
for public education. It’s not important
to us because you only educate the next generation if you believe you have a
future. And we no longer believe we do.
Awww, just how dumb
are we, Part III?
The AP
reports that health-care spending will be one-fifth of the economy by 2021.
Even if the Supremes don’t overturn Obamacare, health care costs, insurance
costs, will all continue to rise, despite new efforts at reform that are now
resulting in savings. The costs are
being driven by an aging population and the rise of often unnecessary expensive
new medical technologies.
And, of
course, a horribly overweight population, with the young kids coming along
destined to die cruelly at a far earlier age than their overweight
parents. As I said, we’ve turned
ourselves into a country with no future. Literally.
And a country sadly filling with the next generation: Under-educated ,
12year-old kids weighing 200 pounds and already diagnosed with diabetes.
But when
the First Lady plants a garden and urges the country to get off its fat butt
and move and eat right, right wing politicos start yelling about The Nanny
State. Propose a tax on sugar and
high-fructose corn sugar, or even propose simply stopping subsidies on those
lucrative and damaging products, or, better yet, shift those subsidies to fresh
fruits and vegetables, and corporate, fake Astroturf organizations and the
right wing will arrive in full force braying about “We” (there it is again,
that “we”) as in “We don’t need any more taxes.”
And now the answer
to, Awwww, just how dumb are we, Part IV?
Meanwhile, Burger King announced they’re rolling out a new summer
treat: The bacon sundae –vanilla soft
serve, fudge, caramel, bacon crumbles and a piece of bacon stuck on top. Logs in at 510 calories, 18 grams of fat and
61 grams of sugar.
I have no
doubt it will be a big hit.
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