The Cynicism Behind the Presidential Smirk

One of the most striking aspects of the Bush administration is its profound cynicism. I'm not referring here to the cynicism with which the president and his team mislead the public (although that's appalling). I'm referring to the cynicism of the worldview that they openly profess and urge Americans to share.

One example is the way Bush talks about taxes. Whenever the possibility of rolling back one of his tax cuts for the wealthy is raised in a public forum, Bush responds by remarking, in effect, that tax increases only hurt the middle class. Why? Because, he says (with his trademark smirk), everyone knows that the rich don't pay taxes anyway--their lawyers and accountants see to that!

I know of course that many Americans share this belief about the rich. But I find it stunning to hear the president state it openly. This is the man who's in charge of the IRS and directs the nation's tax policies, announcing publicly that the tax system is blatantly unfair and that he is either powerless to do anything about it or utterly uninterested in trying!

(Obviously it's not true that the rich don't pay taxes. If they didn't, what would be the point of lowering their tax rates? Bush doesn't say this because he believes it; he says it because a cynical attitude toward taxation serves his ideological goal of crippling most domestic functions of government.)

Don't get me wrong, I'm not surprised that a U.S. president would permit a tax system that favors the rich. I'm surprised that he would say so publicly, with a wink and a shrug. That's what I mean by cynicism.

Now Bush and the so-called conservatives are promoting an even more startling form of cynicism as part of their effort to undermine Social Security. When they denigrate the federal I.O.U.s that constitute the Social Security "trust fund" as meaningless pieces of paper that will never be honored, they are, in effect, announcing that the government intends to default on its debts. This is something that the U.S. somehow avoided doing through a Civil War, the Great Depression, and two world wars. Such a default would clearly ruin our international financial status if applied to (say) the "meaningless pieces of paper" held by our creditors in Japan, China, and Europe (which, oddly enough, no one seems to be proposing).

It's bad enough when people at the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation peddle this negativity (which they do, again, for purely ideological reasons--to frighten people into abandoning Social Security). But for the president of the United States to openly declare that the government which he heads can't be trusted to pay off its debts--and to get away with it in the court of public opinion--simply shocks me.

I used to say that Nixon had done more than any other single person to debase American attitudes toward democracy. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a new champion.