Scenario A. The Bush tax cuts of 2001/2003 gave huge tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans which lowered the U.S. Treasury revenues at the same time we were running record trade deficits and conducting two unfunded wars.  8 years, 2 recessions and a decimated housing market later, we discovered that $16 trillion in personal wealth had gone up in smoke, and we are still digging our way out of the 2^nd worst economic hole in human history.

 

Scenario B. Allowing the same tax cuts to expire will restore the tax policies that we had during the Clinton years, a time when we saw the longest period of economic expansion in our history, 3.9 percent unemployment, 23 million new jobs created, and 4 consecutive budget surpluses. 

 

Your task, as a person with rational deliberative skills, is to choose which of the two scenarios you prefer for you and for your family. Don’t be influenced by the fact that the American public has just voted indirectly on these two scenarios after being bombarded by 6 months of the most intensive propaganda money can buy. And they chose Scenario B by a 3 million vote margin.

 

Actually, you don’t get to vote again. Your representatives do. You merely got to help set the stage when we elected President Obama who favors Scenario B, and we elected 10 (net) new members to the House who favor Scenario B, and 6 new members to Senate who favor Scenario B. 

 

But old habits die hard. The super PACs are cranking up their creaky old propaganda machines again. And they’re spitting out more venom.  They’re now calling Scenario B a “fiscal cliff.” Why would they so grossly misrepresent the truth?

 

The reason is as perverse as it is simple: They believe in the “Big Lie” theory:   Repeat a lie often enough and sooner or later it will take hold. This grand idea was first hatched by Adolf Hitler while languishing in a prison cell back in 1925 Germany. He announced it to the world in his demented autobiography called Mein Kampf. Then he pushed it through the mind of Josef Goebbels, his Minister of Propaganda during the reign of the Third Reich. Unfortunately, it survived the death of the Third Reich in 1945. Most of the Nazi rats are gone, but a lot of their poison remains. It is a theory that needs no further testing, and a history that needs no more repeating.

 

As to a fiscal cliff? We went over it in 2008. We don’t need to that again either.