Obscuring A Debate Over Butlers

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http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/13548/obscuring_a_debate_over_butlers


For all the superheated rhetoric of yet another election cycle, it's as clear as ever that the Republican and Democratic parties in Washington pretty much support the same economic policies. Indeed, any honest perusal of congressional votes proves that the party establishments are roughly the same when it comes to financial deregulation (less of it), job-killing free trade (more of it), bailouts (more of them) and corporate taxes (less of them).

Politicians and partisan media outlets deny this obvious reality, of course. But they do so because they have a vested interest in the red-versus-blue “polarization” narrative from which they generate campaign contributions and ratings, respectively. This is why their hysterical attacks on their foes—and their refusal to acknowledge the political duopoly—has such a grating “doth protest too much” quality. It's also why more Americans are wholly tuning out of politics—we're less and less interested in gazing at two heads of the same economic monster.

That said, if you are still gullible enough to believe the illusion of huge differences on economics, behold the “debate” over taxes that is now roiling the presidential race.

President Obama kicked it off with his claim last week that he wants to stop “another tax cut for the wealthy.” As supposed proof, he asserts that by proposing to extend all of the Bush tax cuts except those applying to top marginal tax rates, he will make sure everyone “making over $250,000 a year [will] go back to the income tax rates [they] were paying under Bill Clinton.” In response, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who wants every Bush tax cut extended, played his role in the kabuki theater, claiming Obama “plans on extending [the tax cuts], just for certain classes of Americans”—an idea that he says “will kill jobs.” Not surprisingly, almost every news outlet echoed it all, insisting that this is an epic dispute over whether to only extend “the Bush-era tax cuts for people earning less than $250,000 a year,” as the New York Times put it.