Politics vs. Reality
The facts are there, but they mean nothing if they are ignored.
By Thomas Sowell
NationalReview.com
It is
hard to understand politics if you are
hung up on reality. Politicians leave
reality to others. What matters in
politics is what you can get the voters
to believe, whether it bears any
resemblance to reality or not.
Not only among politicians, but also
among much of the media, and even among
some of the public, the quest is not for
truth about reality but for talking
points that fit a vision or advance an
agenda. Some seem to see it as a
personal
contest about who is best at
fencing with words.
The current controversy over whether to
deal with our massive national debt by
cutting spending, or whether instead to
raise tax rates on “the rich,” is a
classic example of talking points versus
reality.
Most of those who favor simply raising
tax rates on “the rich” — or who say
that we cannot afford to allow the Bush
“tax cuts for the rich” to continue —
show not the slightest interest in the
history of what has actually happened
when tax rates were raised to high
levels on “the rich,” as compared with
what has actually happened when there
have been “tax cuts for the rich.”
As far as such people are concerned,
those questions have already been
settled by their talking points. Why
confuse the issue by digging into
empirical evidence about what has
actually happened when one policy or the
other was followed?
The political battles about whether to
have high tax rates on people in high
income brackets or to instead
have “tax cuts for the rich” have been
fought out in at least four different
administrations in the 20th century —
under Presidents Calvin Coolidge, John
F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and George W.
Bush.
The empirical facts are there, but they
mean nothing if people don’t look at
them, and instead rely on talking
points.
The first time this political battle was
fought, during the Coolidge
administration, the tax-cutters won. The
data show that “the rich” supplied less
tax revenue to the government when the
top income tax rate was 73 percent in
1921 than they supplied after the income
tax rate was reduced to 24 percent in
1925.
Because high tax rates can easily be
avoided, both then and now, “the rich”
were much less affected by high tax
rates than was the economy and the
people who were looking for jobs. After
the Coolidge tax cuts, the increased
economic activity led to unemployment
rates that ranged from a high of 4.2
percent to a low of 1.8 percent.
But that is only a fact about reality —
and, for many, reality lacks the appeal
of talking points.
The same preference for talking points,
and the same lack of interest in digging
into the facts about realities, prevails
today in discussions of whether to have
a government-controlled medical system.
Since there are various countries, such
as Canada and Britain, that have the
kind of government-controlled medical
systems that some Americans advocate,
you might think that there would be
great interest in the quality of medical
care in these countries.
The
data are readily available as
to how many weeks or months people have
to wait to see a primary-care physician
in such countries, and how many
additional weeks or months they have to
wait after they are referred to a
surgeon or other specialist. There are
data on how often their governments
allow patients to receive the latest
pharmaceutical drugs, as compared with
how often Americans use such advanced
medications.
But supporters of government medical
care show virtually no interest in such
realities. Their big talking point is
that the life expectancy in the United
States is not as long as in those other
countries. End of discussion, as far as
they are concerned.
They have no interest in the reality
that medical care has much less effect
on death rates from homicide, obesity,
and narcotics addiction than it has on
death rates from cancer or other
conditions that doctors can do something
about. Americans survive various cancers
better than people anywhere else.
Americans also get to see doctors much
sooner for medical treatment in general.
Talking points trump reality in
political discussions of many other
issues, from gun control to rent
control. Reality simply does not have
the pizzazz of clever talking points.
—
Thomas
Sowell is a senior fellow at the
Hoover Institution. © 2011 Creators
Syndicate, Inc.