George W. Bush hopped aboard Air Force One and flew out to New Mexico, Nebraska and kindred pressure-point states to hawk his new tax cuts just days after the administration announced that another plane, this one flying from Baghdad back to the states, would ferry home Task Force 75, the military unit in charge of finding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The task force grumpily packed its bags, having scoured the landscape for several weeks and unearthed mostly fertilizer.
What, aside from aviation, do these two developments have in common? Plenty, it turns out. Both are vivid representations of this administration's dishonest modus operandi, which is to proclaim that the goal is X when it's really Z, then construct arguments around X that make it sound as if anyone who's against it is against hot dogs on the Fourth of July. It works, too, and if the Democrats are going to have a chance next year, they need to find ways to get out of the box Karl Rove wants to put them in and reframe the arguments.
On the tax cut -- and specifically the proposed elimination of the dividend tax -- the announced goals are to boost the economy and free the vast investing class, which Bush has taken pains to point out includes "teachers" and "policemen,";; from the yoke of purported double taxation. Who could possibly be against it?
The hidden goal is one that the administration won't quite come out and talk about (yet) but that is buried in reports few people read and will surely burst out into the open sometime during Bush's second term, should such befall us. That goal is to replace the income-tax system with a consumption-tax system.
I'm not an economist; you can Google "consumption tax" and see what you learn. But the basic idea is graspable enough. Consumption, rather than income, would become the basis of the taxation system. People who have to spend a greater percentage of their income consuming would therefore spend a higher, maybe far higher, percentage of that income paying the tax. This, of course, means poor and working-class people. Consumption-tax advocates say safeguards could be built in to mitigate this -- for example, a "necessities" exemption that would declare certain necessary items to be tax-free, or an exemption for everyone who makes less than, say, $20,000 a year. But those who make $40,000 or $50,000 annually would find their lifestyles radically altered by a consumption tax.
The other likely outcome of a consumption-tax system is that it would bring in less overall revenue. This is another unspoken conservative goal: to "waste" less on protecting the environment and paying for Medicare and doing all those other busybody things we liberals want the government to do.
The administration won't talk about this -- as I say, yet. But in the White House's annual economic report to Congress, prepared in February by the Council of Economic Advisers, a section was devoted to hymning a consumption tax, offering, in the words of The New York Times correspondent who covered the report's release, "a scathing critique of the current tax system and an exuberant description of radical alternatives."
Then, Jeff Birnbaum, Fortune magazine's Washington bureau chief, interviewed the president. Birnbaum recounted the conversation in this way on NPR's Marketplace: "In my meeting with him, I asked if he wanted to move toward a consumption tax. At first he said not really. Instead, he said, what he really wants is simplification. . . . But then he added those words that politicians often do when they really have something up their sleeves. He said he didn't want anything more at this point."
The MO ought to sound familiar. Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and other neocons have been desperate to invade Iraq since 1992, an intention they announced in that year's Defense Planning Guidance document. The reasons as laid out in that paper were bare-knuckled: We needed to invade Iraq for reasons of geopolitical hegemony, and to show the rest of the world that we could.
But that approach was criticized at the time, and Rove and Bush, with the help of extensive White House polling, understood that it wouldn't fly with the majority of the American people today. So new and less Strangelovian rationales would be necessary. One, September 11, was handed to the administration. The other, Saddam Hussein as imminent threat, was created in a massive propaganda campaign. This was the rationale that clinched the deal with the American public, and so it was the one that was emphasized while the actual plainspoken agenda was one that very few Americans knew anything about. And now the WMD task force flies home empty-handed. But will anyone care?
That, I guess, is up to the Democrats, because lord knows we've already learned that mainstream journalism won't hold the White House accountable. If large caches are eventually found, so be it. But if they are not, shouldn't this be an issue the Democratic presidential nominee can use in September and October of 2004? And shouldn't that Democrat be able to find a way to expose and exploit the real intent behind the Bush tax cuts, which majorities never favor in polls until Bush takes his medicine show on the road and starts ladling out the sauce about how he really has the interests of teachers and policemen at heart?
The Bush White House is very skillful -- with the help of the government Propaganda Ministry, aka FOX -- at framing these things so that anyone who raises the obvious questions about WMDs is unpatriotic and anyone who doubts the value of the tax cut is engaged in class warfare.
Changing this dynamic won't be easy. With regard to weapons of mass destruction, it will be hard to get swing voters worked up about the issue when the Iraq War was won so handily. And that class-warfare tag sticks pretty well.
But the Democrats do need to find a way out of this cycle that's keeping them constantly on the defensive. As we know from experience, by the time this administration gets around to admitting the truth and revealing its actual agenda, the damage will already be done.
Michael Tomasky's column appears every Wednesday at TAP Online.
