Cons’ Catch-22: Creating Problems That Justify Creating More Problems

DAVID SIROTA: Ah ha! I love it when my predictions appear to come true. Indulge me by letting me gloat just for a moment, will you?

Yesterday, I pointed out right here on this blog that thanks to the leadership of Republican Gov. Bill Owens (a conservative movement posterboy), Colorado severance tax revenues have been diverted from infrastructure improvement and into some questionable spending projects. I warned, though, that we should “never underestimate the willingness of a conservative to use a story about their colleagues’ own misguided behavior as a reason society should turn even farther to the Genghis Khan Right.” That’s the brilliance of conservatives’ Catch-22 formula, after all: They create problems that they then use as rationales for the very ideologies that created the problems in the first place. How many times have we heard conservatives cite an underfinanced government program’s failure to fulfill its mandate as a rationale to further cut the budget of the program, thus making it even more impossible for that program to succeed?

Now, cut to today’s post by Harsanyi where out of an entire lengthy Rasmussen poll, he points us specifically to two questions that show 46 percent of Coloradoans say they would not be willing to support a proposal to increase taxes to fund infrastructure improvements, and that 69 percent believe that if such a proposal would result in the new tax revenues being spent on “other purposes” than infrastructure.

First, I’m kinda surprised an anti-taxer like Harsanyi is trumpeting the stunning statistic that showing less than half of Coloradoans oppose the concept of tax increases - incredibly low for a state that has over the years been the target of some of the most intense and sustained anti-tax propaganda ever seen in America. But let’s get back to my prediction.

Though I don’t want to put words in Harsanyi’s mouth here, I think that from the upcoming publication of his book railing on the “nanny state” and from his consistent writing against taxes, we can safely assume that he posted these specific poll questions as a way to show a modicum of Colorado support for his (and the broader conservative movement’s) generally anti-tax views. And that seems in a sort of indirect way to be doing exactly what I predicted: Citing a problem the Right itself created (ie. Owens’ diversion of tax revenues into “other purposes” which leads to public cynicism about government spending decisions) in order to justify the Right’s agenda (ie. reflexive anti-tax zeitgeist).

Let me state very clearly here that it is true, Harsanyi’s post is fairly minimalist in that he posted a select few poll results and didn’t explicitly say that the results should prove that his ideas on taxes are thus super popular and proven correct. But again, I think it is safe to assume that’s the meaning of his post mainly because of the specific questions he picked out and how they go together with his broader political ideology.

But I’m honestly holding out the possibility that that could be wrong. It’s possible he just wrote up his post to just say, wow this is interesting. It is possible he is ready to do another post later in the day positioning himself as a courageous principled conservative, saying what a tragedy it is that Republican mismanagement of tax dollars has helped fuel public cynicism toward the government’s tax and spending decisions; that he is thrilled that nonetheless a strong majority of Coloradoans tell pollsters they would consider tax reforms to fund infrastructure investments; and that he strongly supports Law-and-Order Democrats’ willingness to use their new majority power to clean up the mess.

That’s all possible - and when it happens, I’m serious: I’ll gladly congratulate him. But I’m not holding my breath.

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