I saw a bizarre ad this morning in the Washington Examiner this morning. It's promoting some website called Defeat The Debt. The biggest print in it by far, however, asks the question "Who Is John Galt?"
The Examiner is, of course, Phillip Anschutz's increasingly shrill right-wing free tabloid that gets handed out at Metro stations and various places around the DC area on weekday mornings. While much of the paper is simply short articles covering news, sports, and entertainment, two things have taken up a steadily bigger share of its pages: Trustee's Sale (i.e. foreclosure sale) Real Estate Notices, and op-ed recitations of strident conservative and/or libertarian propaganda.
John Galt, of course, is the hero of Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged, and the above question is the first line of the novel, in which the super-rich, led by this John Galt, throw off the yoke of the mediocre masses and form a sort of anarcho-capitalist utopia, an absurd premise made that much more painful by the mind-numbing volume of cringe-inducing prose. This novel is widely read among the more educated denizens of Wingnuttia, but the question "Who is John Galt?" is probably perplexing to your average Metro rider. And it goes unanswered by this particular ad, though there is a large graphic of Atlas holding up the Earth, an image from Greek myth that's usually on the cover of most print editions of Atlas Shrugged I've seen. But since none of this is explained anywhere on the page, I can only assume that the ad is what's commonly referred to in political circles as a "dog whistle."
The only real substance in the ad is a set of three bullet points, with accompanying cites:
* In New York City, 1% of taxpayers pay almost 50% of the city's income taxes.
* In California, the top 1% pay nearly 47% of the state's income taxes.
* The top 1% of American earners pay 40% of all federal income taxes.
At the bottom is the phrase "The Debt Disaster: It's Closer Than You Think" with a link to the website as I have it above.
The unstated premise seems to be what is known to seasoned Kossacks as the "lucky duckies" argument - namely that lower income people should feel fortunate that they pay fewer taxes or less in taxes than the super-wealthy and that the rich ought to be angry that the rest of the country aren't paying as much in taxes as they are.
I see the 40% figure at least cited a lot, usually (but not always) by the right. Of course this figure and the others cited in the ad conveniently focus only on the income tax and ignore entirely payroll taxes and sales taxes, which constitute a larger share of taxes paid by lower-income individuals than income taxes do. More importantly, for some reason it seldom occurs to these people that by far the biggest reason that the share of income taxes by that segment of the population is so high compared to other times in history is that this segment earns a bigger share of the income and controls a larger share of the nation's wealth than has been the case in several decades. Never mind that with the exception of a small increase enacted in 1993 that was later repealed, tax rates on high incomes have been going in only one direction for the past several decades - downward.
I went to the website and, other than another copy of this ad, saw nothing else about cutting taxes on high income or high-wealth individuals. It was mostly a standard issue "deficit-hawk" website, though it conveniently fails to mention the central role played by self-styled "fiscal conservative" Republicans in exploding the deficit. It even includes a quote from Ronald Reagan, of all people, about how deficits are bad. (Funny how many Republicans insist that "deficits don't matter" when they're in charge and how the end is nigh when they're not in charge.) There's a comment board of sorts; the main topic there seems to be conservatives issuing dire warnings that Democratic government will cause Mugabe/Weimar levels of hyperinflation. Never mind that most indicators point to the possibility of deflation as a far bigger concern at this time. And how on earth a budget deficit is going to be decreased by tax cuts is of course unexplained.
Defeat The Debt is apparently a project of the Employment Policy Institute. I looked at their website and it consisted mostly of op-ed pieces that argued against minimum wage and/or living wage laws, with some newer pieces concerning health care.
I am not sure who is bankrolling the Employment Policy Institute but we should make sure to follow the money on here. I suspect another Astroturf operation.
Anyone else see this thing?