Fantasy and Death by Label

“I will lower taxes for ______.” Relevant? Both candidates want to lower taxes for somebody. Well you can't ignore it, but what really matters is 1. what your after-tax dollars will buy compared with what they would buy a few years ago and 2. what the value of your retained after tax dollars (investments) are worth when compared to global assets – is the dollar worth more or less in the global marketplace than other currencies, critical since we import so much? Think of the lost value as hidden tax (the one politicians don't want you to think about).

Put this another way; what would you rather have: 1. half the tax rate and be able to buy half of what you could buy before the tax was lowered? or 2. double the tax rate and be able to buy more than you could buy before the tax was raised? Bottom line: if governments, relative to other international governments (an important distinction in times of global crisis – most nations will run deficits), borrow much more than they spend and do not raise taxes, that currency will always buy less than currencies of nations that do not spend and borrow like that.

Was someone unpatriotic if they voted against the “Patriot Act” or even questioned that statute? Nobody in Congress really read it when they passed it – it was too long, and there was a crisis. If "those opposed" were unpatriotic, were the courts that threw out a whole pile of provisions of that Act as unconstitutional unpatriotic?

Is someone who believes in Social Security, insuring bank deposits up to a certain limit, allowing the FDA to make sure our food is safe, favors stock market regulation, etc. a “socialist”? What is socialism? Really? What is a conservative? A conservationist? A liberal? A fundamentalist? Do outdated, over-simplistic descriptive works even matter?

Did our founding fathers promote the Constitution as a document, created in the late 1700's and intended to apply for centuries, to be one of “strict construction”? If they did, don't we need to go back and amend the Constitution to permit Congress to have created the Air Force? The Constitution only permitted the raising of a standing army and a navy.

That’s the new American way. Attach an old-world, irrelevant label or buzz word to a value, a belief, a statute or a policy, and if the old-world meaning attaches with a negative valance, you can kill the person who promulgated it, defeat the program, and no one will be the wiser. Politicians seem to be counting on stupid Americans who don't go any farther than accepting the label without asking what the real program is and whether or not they might actually approve the concept if it did not have a label. With a catchy label, you can call road kill filet mignon, and Americans will gobble it up. We really can't be that stupid, can we? Are we all about the marketing and not the message?

I’m Peter Dekom, and I approve this “message.”