THE RIGHT WING'S BIG LIE

From the New York Times, Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman opines on the Republican "mandate" to cut spending:

The key point to understand is that while many voters say that they want lower spending, press the issue a bit further and it turns out that they only want to cut spending on other people.

That’s the lesson from a new survey by the Pew Research Center, in which Americans were asked whether they favored higher or lower spending in a variety of areas. It turns out that they want more, not less, spending on most things, including education and Medicare. They’re evenly divided about spending on aid to the unemployed and — surprise — defense.

And

How can voters be so ill informed? In their defense, bear in mind that they have jobs, children to raise, parents to take care of. They don’t have the time or the incentive to study the federal budget, let alone state budgets (which are by and large incomprehensible). So they rely on what they hear from seemingly authoritative figures.

And what they’ve been hearing ever since Ronald Reagan is that their hard-earned dollars are going to waste, paying for vast armies of useless bureaucrats (payroll is only 5 percent of federal spending) and welfare queens driving Cadillacs. How can we expect voters to appreciate fiscal reality when politicians consistently misrepresent that reality?

More here.

This Pew survey verifies what Noam Chomsky has been saying for years, that the American people are fairly liberal in that they really do want big federal spending programs. And this is pretty damned fascinating in that this reality exists side by side with the right wing's very useful and widely believed lie asserting that all these programs are nothing but wasted money "redistributed" away from you, the hard working honest (white) citizen, and toward those people over there, the lazy parasitic (black or brown) citizens and illegal aliens.

Indeed, welfare used to be fairly popular in this country until the Republicans back in the 1980s got everyone thinking all that money was going to lazy black welfare queens.

But, of course, it's not just the Republicans. Once the Democrats saw how this GOP message hit a nerve in the American heartland, they signed on to the big lie, too. Both parties, indeed, the entire establishment, now push this mythological concept that Americans don't like big government or big spending. I mean, sure, in theory, Americans don't like big government and massive social programs. But that's all "get the government off the little guy's back" bullshit. It's not an argument. It's not an analysis. It's knee-jerk responding to decades of propaganda without the least bit of in-depth thinking. And once you actually do some in-depth thinking, it's like, oh, well, I guess we really do like that kind of spending.

Krugman is very right to observe that our leaders have been literally lying to us about economics for decades. I've tried to attack some of those lies here at Real Art over the years, but it's really easy to get lost among the trees and miss the forest. The overall problem is that the establishment has totally confused the entire fucking nation about how dollars and cents really function at the federal level, and that's a crime against democracy.

It's no wonder our nation is so utterly dysfunctional.

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