Henri Reynard Speaks Out

What Makes Politicians Lie?

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Not, of course, that any of our political leaders would ever dream of lying to us. It is a given that when the truth deviates from the world as presented to us by our politicians that it was merely an "oversight", or "an unfortunate turn of phrase". Slippery as the truth is in the most revealing of environments where truth is expected to be the norm, for instance financial reports by independent auditors, in the political world it as hard to hold on to as greased lightening. Why is that? My mother had a theory that covered a lot of that phenomenon. "Man is the only beast that lies," she would say while using any implement that was handy to whack the lying out of me. Now I don't believe that she was referring to the fact that I was a male child, but I have no proof to the contrary either.

I learned that in order to obscure their real location or that of their offspring, beasts of the field often misdirect a predator. Since what is at stake there is far more important to them than mere political survival they of course are forgiven for any, "lies," their actions tell. The use of misdirection is one of the characteristics of humanity that has followed us up from the caves or even possibly down from the trees. When I discovered the story about how a grouse hen will draw a fox away from her nest by dragging her wing on the ground I just knew that fox felt lied to when she flew away. I did not however feel adequately armed to impress my mother with the possible origin of lying in the biological imperative of survival. My survival instincts were already too well honed for that kind of folly.

Childhood aside the most popular form of lie is the polite "white lie" of social convention. It is always better to politely decline an invitation by your best friend from high school than to tell him about the time his inebriated wife tried to corner you in the hallway. It is often our fate for our company to be desired by those we would never socialize with voluntarily and usually visa versa. Which brings me back to politicians and the curse of lying thieves watching our national till. Most of us just want the people we elect to do their job and spend the money we send them in taxes without bothering us too much in the process. The federal budget is 2.2 trillion dollars. That is enough money to choke every horse on the planet with a little left over for all the politicians who rode in on them.

Now of course we can't really use the money to choke all of those darlings, the politicians, that is, the horses wouldn't really put money in their mouth; they're too smart for that. We need it for the services we get from our government. Including the new Homeland Security Department; which provides us with gems of advice like buy duct tape to seal your house against gas attacks. Now if you live on the thirteenth floor of a walkup in Brooklyn your chance of really sealing out any gas that makes it up that high is really low. Of course the government can only offer one size fits all advice, kind of like the uniforms they issued us in the army. Since one dollar out of every five that makes its way out into public this year will be spent by our Federal Government we probably need to watch the till a little ourselves. Especially since our taxes won't cover the total amount but will fall significantly short, somewhere over three hundred billion short to be inexact.

The reason that I am being inexact is because there is a war missing from our budget, or maybe two wars, it's really hard to keep track of those things. But what's a war more or less among friends; only it seems that we might have misplaced a few of our friends in this process. Turkey is firmly in the friend's column now that we have paid for the privilege of dining on the battlefield with the Turks. So we could be starting the year expecting to pay for a war that may cost us one hundred billion or more and wind up ending the year having paid for two that cost us two hundred billion each. The deficit is clearly subject to grow under those conditions.

Now in here I have nowhere said that our President lied to us, nor that he willfully withheld information from us. I merely suspect that he used misdirection in regard to his budget and tax cuts. I am watching his wing dragging across the television screen daily but I'm not buying what he is selling. Reducing taxes at the time when we need more money to fight a couple of little wars is probably going to result in a remarkable deficit this year. Something more in the range of four hundred billion dollars and possibly as much as five hundred billion if anything goes really wrong. This will drive up interest rates at a time when businesses are having a hard time raising equity capital, which the tax changes will actually do little to cure. This piece of misdirection is going to have serious unintended impacts on an already damaged economy. You need to take a good look at the man behind the curtain. It is going to take a lot more than whiz bangs and mirrors and clicking our heels together to get us back to Kansas this time Toto. We may just have to bite the bullet and pay a few more taxes, even if our generous President doesn't want us to.