Tax Fiddling While Rome Burns

One of 2010’s most overworked words is ‘surreal’, but we’ll go ahead and use it one more time before the year is up. The shoe fits.

It is truly surreal to observe media coverage of the no-brainer decision to extend existing tax rates rather than allow them to increase on January 1. It is felony stupid to even consider raising tax rates in the middle of a depressed economy, and anyone with a lick of common sense knows this. But the media coverage all but ignores basic economics. Instead, we’re supposed to be fascinated by the political intrigue of how Obama will react to the message of the mid-term elections; we are to hold our breath to see if the new Republican leadership has the backbone to resist some compromise that allows tax hikes on ‘the rich’; we are to be engaged in the great speculation over whether and to what extent Obama’s leftist ‘base’ will react; we are to await with great excitement to see if Obama’s approval rating goes up a point or two in reaction to his grand gesture of so-called ‘compromise’. We are to sit passively while the media whips up opposition to all things tea party/conservative/Republican in the hopes of reversing the overwhelming tide of public opinion as expressed on November 2nd.

Meanwhile we continue to a have a federal government operating with no budget while spending at incomprehensible, out of control, wholly unsustainable levels, with no talk of cutting spending, and cutting it radically. We have prices at the gas pump pushing past $3 per gallon, at the same time the Obama administration continues a moratorium on offshore drilling. We have Islamic terrorists continuing to plot and plan to inflict mass death in American cities while we have an administration that encourages a triumphal Islamic mosque at Ground Zero and endorses a politically-correct-to-the-point-of-complete-moral-idiocy approach to terrorist prosecution and airport security. We have North Korea and Iran itching to provoke unconscionable attacks on civilization while the American Attorney General travels abroad to lobby unsuccessfully for a soccer tournament in the US in 2018. Litigation attempting to stop the state of Arizona from enforcing immigration law continues, as does the absence of any disciplinary action at the Department of Justice for the outrageous handling of the Black Panther voter intimidation case. And oh by the way, some creepy weirdo teaming with a gay Army private have proven that the entire information security apparatus of the State Department and Department of Defense are a sham—yet we have a group at the White House that can’t seem to decide whether they even care about the implications of what was done or what has leaked so long as the overall effect is to damage a Democrat political rival (Hillary Clinton).

The ‘surreality’ of it all just illustrates once again how wildly out of touch our media elites and political elites have become. America and humanity itself are at one of the most pivotal and dangerous points in all of history, and the majority of Americans know it. But the elites think we’re in some sort of bubble where politics is just entertainment, and their place and position in charge of entertainment for the masses is secure.

We’re not sure exactly what Nero did while Rome was burning, but his mindset has clearly survived in the political and media elites of Washington, D.C. in 2010. But there are a few differences: the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution are now ‘on the record’ and 230+ years of a breed called “Americans” have lived under them. Americans have not gone wobbly; they are not accepting the passive roles the elites would assign to them. They spoke formally on November 2nd, but they are by no means finished speaking. The only burning they are going to allow is the burning that comes from elites who refuse to move their feet from the fire that is growing under them.

Paul Gable

December 7, 2010