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Stock Ideas Investors Daily Edge The War on Taxpayers
Stock Ideas Investors Daily Edge The War on Taxpayers 
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By Rick Pendergraft Here we go again. The most important economic event of the week is the FOMC meeting on Tuesday. Investors are expecting the Fed to take action for the third straight meeting and reduce the fed funds rate. |
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| The War on Taxpayers |
| Saturday, 07 June 2008 | ||||||||
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During the past several weeks this space has been dedicated to revealing the many ways the U.S. government screws the heck out of its citizens. Two new books on the market have led me to an epiphany. It is that my recent effort needs to be branded. Branded in a pithy unforgettable way – in a manner like when you hear the word “unforgettable” you hear Nat King Cole. One of the new books, of course, is Scott McClellan’s insider look at the Bush White House. I haven’t read it. Probably never will. But, that’s only because I don’t believe in rewarding federal officials who write kiss-and-tell books. Especially ones about how they never spoke up when they saw all sorts of bad stuff happening while you and I were paying them. Still, McClellan’s retrospective attempts to spank Team Bush for its single-minded lack of curiosity, especially about the war in Iraq. And, to its credit, the Bush PR team, well honed in dealing with critics, never once challenged the book’s veracity. Rather, it furiously rolled out its branding machine to label McClellan with a term that even progressives find unctuous. It branded McClellan as “disloyal” over and over again. Mind Control The other book – which should have had conservatives really howling, except that it is way over Bill O’Reilly’s and Rush Limbaugh’s heads – is George Lakoff’s The Political Mind. Lakoff is one of the world’s leading cognitive linguists. His book’s thesis is that powerful US conservatives – particularly, those in the Bush administration – have stealthfully deployed the latest techniques of cognitive science in order to control the US populace’s thought processes. That’s because cognitive science has discovered that different ways of framing issues have a big effect on the way people think and vote. So, the war in Iraq is not a costly hissy fit of an uncurious dullard and his evil sidekicks (as McClellan claims). It’s not about big oil, as progressives claim. It not even about taking care of unfinished business left over from the first Bush presidency. Nope. According to Lakoff it is about the “War On Terror”. But not just the War on Terror, but repeating that phrase over and over until its hardwired into the neurons that make up American brains.
It seems, claims Lakoff, that after hearing those words again and again, ordinary people literally get stuck thinking that way. Well, at least, ordinary people with conservative tendencies. Because, Lakoff suggests that the physiological root of the ability to persuade conservatives is found in our parents. Isn’t it always? As Owen Flannigan (who finds Lakoff’s book laughable) explained in the May 2008 the New Scientist, Lakoff believes that we automatically use a “nation as a family” metaphor, which can be broken down into two competing models: the “strict father family” and the “nurturing parents family”. Conservatives, he says, idolize “daddy” and believe that “morality is obedience to an authority. One that is assumed to be a legitimate authority and one who is inherently good, knows right from wrong, functions to protect us from evil in the world, and has both the right and duty to use force to command obedience and fight evil.” In this case, the cognitive effect is that Bush didn’t have to win public approval for the war, because the public, particularly conservatives, think of the president as father with final say over all matters. Progressives, apparently, see the world through the nurturing parents model. That’s the one with “ethics of care,” moved by “a single moral value: empathy, together with responsibility and strength to act on the empathy.” These old ideas of equal worth and dignity still do much of the work for an empathic, progressive crowd… a body politic that strives for the common good. You Know You’re Fuming Now, I bet I was right. If you’re a conservative you’re probably howling – as you should be. One of the top linguists in the world has made sport with you – accused you of being a blindly loyal, susceptible-to-propaganda follower. And, you and I know that sounds more like 1942 than 2001 or 2008. But, as I mentioned, it’s too bad this book is way over the heads of leading conservative commentators. They should be frying Lakoff because he paints such a nasty picture of conservatives… most of whom, like you, are very decent people. Get The Branding Iron So, after a week of considering all this branding and cognitive science stuff – I have decided to brand my drive to reveal the multitude of ways in which government screws anyone not worth at least $10 million. As you see, there’s real science behind this. So I came up with a brand that will resonate with both sides of the – ahem – family. THE WAR ON TAXPAYERS So, let’s go on the offensive. But, if you don’t own a small- or medium sized business – or you don’t care about intrusive government programs or the notion of innocent until proven guilty – go ahead and skip down to the next section, now. There’s a great potential scam below. But this one is interesting, too... You see, while it defends to the hilt the need for massive tax breaks and credits for oil companies, the Bush administration fired another volley in THE WAR ON TAXPAYERS. It proposes a new tax collection program that would force credit card companies to report merchants' income to the Internal Revenue Service. The proposal is spelled out in the White House's FY09 federal budget request for the US Treasury. In it, the administration includes some 16 changes to existing tax law designed to collect what it claims will be more than $36 billion in new revenues over 10 years. But, according to the Center for Democracy & Technology, the whole scheme is “disturbing.” The CDT says that it “would require credit card companies to turn over to the government large amounts of data about their merchants without any reason to believe that they have broken any laws.” The CDT also charges that the plan will create another private sector database tied to Social Security numbers at a time when ID theft experts are urging private companies to stop collecting and storing such information. The liability for losing this stuff is massive. According to CDT analysts, the proposal would require credit card companies to report the aggregate transactions of all businesses that have merchant accounts with the card issuers. The reports to the IRS would be tied to each merchant's taxpayer identification number. Of course, those of you on the front lines in THE WAR ON TAXPAYERS already know the problem with that. In many cases, small businesses use their owners' Social Security numbers as their taxpayer ID… or don’t even have taxpayer identification numbers. But, the Bush administration has that latter contingency covered, too. It is taking no prisoners in THE WAR ON TAXPAYERS Under an April 5 draft of legislation, credit card companies would be required to withhold 28% of receipts for businesses that do not provide a taxpayer ID number. “The Treasury Department has done little to justify why Congress should impose this substantial new burden on sole proprietors and other small businesses,” CDT concluded. So, Washington wants to burden small businesses with a new layer of bureaucracy and paper work. And, it wants to create a new database that stores personal or information in a federal computer system that is considered a joke by computer security professionals. Worst of all, Washington is implying because some small businesses fudge on taxes all must pay the price. Washington should clean up its own house first… but shutting down that corrupt gravy train would be disloyal. And that is the latest dispatch from the front line of THE WAR ON TAXPAYERS. Lock and Load. Andy P.S. To let me know what you thought of today's article, send an e-mail to: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
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