Mom's Getting Wealthy on What Could Be A Mammal

I painted some beautiful horses when I was a kid. All that it took to get me started on what I was certain would become a highly successful painting career was a few bucks and the discerning purchase of a paint-by-number kit.

Many a long hour was spent as I began to slowly fill in the canvases' sections with exotic colors mysteriously referred to as number 3, 7, or 9. As patches of the canvas were one by one filled in with splashes of color, a spectacular stallion's image appeared. (I also remember doing one with a Mommy and Baby horse. Unfortunately by the time I had finished it looked more like a T-Rex being nuzzled by a goat.)

Those same paint by number kits are oddly similar to the way things work in politics. Political strategists are students of demographics, trends, and human nature, and they have a very good grasp on how certain target constituencies will respond to particular messages. This is why they are paid a lot of money by political bodies while food banks' shelves remain almost empty--they know exactly how to break down the hugely complex issues facing society today into small easy steps. They know, in effect, what color to paint certain patches.

Last week I talked about one of these more obvious strategies used by politicians; where sympathetic victims are used as poster children to justify the hoisting of taxes.

Yesterday I happened upon Michigan Rep. Kate Segal's (D-Battle Creek) website where I found, in one glorious paragraph, not only that strategy being employed but also two others; the "we owe it to the employees" strategy, and the "taxpayer dissociation" strategy.

Without this vital funding, not only will at-risk kids from across Michigan lose their last best chance to graduate from high school, but more than 50 employees of the MYCA will lose their jobs. If the academy closes its doors, supporting these unemployed workers will cost the state approximately $2 million – more than the cost of the state funding being cut.

Emphasis mine.

When one slogs through the "little Suzy will suffer" portion, it is easy to find the "we owe it to the employees" section. What the strategists have discovered is that the loss of jobs provides countless additional victims to be exploited for the benefit of maintaining or growing the size of government, regardless of any detriment to the taxpayer. We see this used every time when military base closings are considered, where government contracts are canceled for antiquated products, or in any other situation where the loss of government funding will affect those employed with the funds. This strategy can very easily ignore the primary benevolent or practical purpose of the program itself and adopt employment as the goal.

We find these employees being used as pawns in heavy handed plots against taxpayers. "Hand over the money or the prison guard gets it," and let's face it, we have all been made aware of those people in Standish (and those within the ranks of the state police) who either already got it or are fixin' to get it. Meanwhile, as most of you are aware, we now have a brand new multi-million dollar state police building down in Lansing that provided a lot of jobs while it was being constructed. That $1 a year rental price tag for the old building was just too much to justify.

After hurdling the first two strategies of the paragraph you will run squarely into the dissociation strategy. When this strategy is successfully used the taxpayer is inexplicably made unaware or unconcerned that he or she pays taxes to multiple taxing authorities and is willing to see one side of the wallet played against the other. The state shamelessly promotes the federal funding as being free while the feds use these "free" funds as leverage so that the states and the locals will cough up their portions. The taxpayers, of course, provide every cent of the money, or at least they will once China is paid off.

Ms. Segal's proud paragraph is a political propagandist's equivalent to a Churchill Down's trifecta; three beautiful horses having finished the race in the exact order predicted by those clambering to the payoff window. And, as we all know, nothing surpasses the power and beauty of a horse as it thunders toward the finish though my childhood forays into the arts were close.

That paint by number kit was a wonderful addition to my childhood. In the end, of course, it didn't add significantly to world culture, but what it did do was help me to visually understand that I could break down a larger process into small easy steps--a process not lost on political strategists. If I followed the formula I had a good chance at accomplishing my goal--in this case an image that would have looked, if not for the smudges and green flecks in the tail, something similar to the one on the box. (More than half of my friends knew almost immediately it was at least some sort of mammal.)

Sadly, at some point during my adolescent years, Mom must have either hauled the crap I painted to the landfill or had the paintings sold at auction for a couple million bucks. In any case, my artwork is now long gone and Mom seems to be living a bit above her obviously pedestrian means.

cross posted at Right Michigan