The latest New York Times/CBS News poll reveals that "Nearly two-thirds of Americans choose higher payroll taxes for Medicare and Social Security over reduced benefits in either program." But -- and there's always a but -- "a majority [also] believes it should not be necessary for them to pay higher taxes to bridge the shortfall between what the government spends and what it takes in."
Hence the towering demagoguery of the political right in Congress and the upcoming, monolithic disinformation campaigns by its presidential candidates: "We can cut our way out of this."
In the more respectable conservative eras of yesteryear -- when, that is, conservatives understood that "fiscal" in "fiscal responsibility" meant fiscal, both expenditures and revenue, and that "responsibility" in "fiscal responsibility" meant responsibility, of the responsible kind -- something of an unpleasant consensus, though a consensus nevertheless, to raise taxes would have gelled among fiscally responsible conservatives because, well, they were fiscally responsible.
They of course would not have entertained the pernicious act of hiking taxes in a recession, nor would they have entertained the colossally imbecile act of actually slashing spending in a recession. "I am now a Keynesian in economics," said Nixon in one of his rare moments of honest engagement, however he could say that only because his surrounding Republican Party had not yet gone hopelessly demagogic and disinformational and downright insane.
Anyway, having battened down those hatches with indifferent abandon and magnificent success, the contemporary GOP now espies yet another opportunity to exploit electoral ambivalence. "Americans’ sometimes contradictory impulses on spending and taxes suggest the political crosscurrents facing both parties," observes the Times. Yet those currents are of asymmetrical force, and the GOP knows it.
When asked -- merely asked, mind you -- the American voter will always volunteer a warm and thoughtful exuberance for higher taxes, if he's told the alternative is that his elders will be forced to select among faith-healers for good health and Purina's assorted varieties for dinner. When Election Day arrives, however, he'll invariably vote for the clown who skewered in 30-second ads that other fellow who was so indelicate as to suggest that fiscal responsibility entails fiscal responsibility.
And in that, no doubt, there lies a central and broad Democratic challenge of voter education, as Republicans persist in their massive disinformation campaign of "We can cut our way out of this." As always, House Republicans have overplayed their hand, making the Democratic challenge a bit softer; they've served up such a mindless platter of fiscal carnage -- $2.5 trillion in spending cuts -- the horrendous shock of it all just might ignite spontaneous national enlightenment.
But the Dems can't count on that. So at some nearing point, Democrats must risk the most politically perilous of all political perils: They must tell the American voter the hellish truth of it all -- that taxes will have to go up. And Democrats might as well begin the softest of voter-education campaigns now, suggesting that politicians who indelicately entertain such thoughts are perhaps the very politicians we should value most.