Our lives are about to be enriched by an 11th Commandment being promoted as the new morality by the country’s political rulers:

Thou Shalt Not Raise Taxes. Ever. At No Time. In No Place. Even a Small New Tax. Even if it’s the best and fairest way to make Social Security solvent for the next 75 years.

Between you and me, there should be small asterisks tied to this new creed of American politics. They will explain the beauty and symmetry of the 11th commandment in the eyes of its exuberant advocates:

* “This commandment has been prayerfully invented to insure the election of all God-fearing, buck-passing politicians who preach it.

* “It is understood that the goal of this commandment is to make the buck-passing politicians appear to be brave and visionary guardians of the public interest.

* “That image will be portrayed daily and relentlessly on television, whether the visionary guardians of peace and prosperity are making war, piling up ocean-to-ocean deficits, losing jobs, robbing kids of a sound education or transforming themselves into wizards of good government by building casinos instead accessible health care. So instead of a modest monthly increase in the payroll tax that would fix Social Security for decades to come, pretend that Social Security is about to go bust, privatize part of it, pump millions into the profits of investment houses, borrow two trillion dollars to pay for the scam, and let the retirees sink or swim 50 years from now.

* “Further: The genius of this system of No New Taxes Ever will be based on the rising level of happy gullibility with which millions of citizens accept cooked numbers. To make this work, the public will also need to ignore the blighted lives of tens of millions of citizens two and three generations from now who will be taxed to the eyeballs to pay for our civic blindness.

* “It’s also understood that the acceptance of this commandment clears America’s current political leaders of any linkage between their self-serving politics and the economic slagpile they are bequeathing to the country’s grandchildren. It is understood that those who elected them also are spared any guilt of complicity.”

How did we get to this place? To comprehend why the public might accept this new application of moral values, we have to thumb through the pages of George Orwell’s “1984.” This is the book that made a convincing case for the proposition that if you push your deceptions cynically enough, you can actually get the citizens to believe that deception is truth. It’s not a theory. Right now, it’s strategy.

So we are being swept along in this campaign to numb the collective mind into believing that we have finally found bold and loving leaders who can protect us from slipping into old fashioned attitudes, such as honestly paying for a fair and decent society if we want a fair and decent society.

That obsolete thinking is being replaced by thrilling new concepts in the social contracts the governments makes with its citizens: The Bush government is now trying to convince us:

1. There IS such a thing as a free lunch. We can achieve it by cutting more taxes and wearing blindfolds so we don’t see corporations defrauding the citizens by moving their mail boxes to a Caribbean Island.

2. We can build an even greater America, and do it on the cheap. We can do it without abandoning one of the most cherished mantras of rugged individualism, which is:

3. Me First.

Everybody wins if we do it this way, folks. Except when the accountants start adding the billions and trillions of dollars of debt that will be dumped on the heads of the ones who come after us, it’s their tough luck. They picked a lousy time to be born.

Most of us used to believe in a different kind of economics, that the first and immutable rule of a social contract worth its paper is that you get what you pay for.

Three and four years ago, some extraordinary things happened in America. Terrorists stole American airliners and flew them into the World Trade towers and the Pentagon and killed 3,000 people. The war in Afghanistan followed. At about the same time the Bush administration began planning a war in Iraq in order, we were told, to save American lives. The government’s expenses soared. At about the same time, the country’s richest people by the hundreds of thousands, and corporate America, were gifted with tax cuts that pulled billions of dollars out of the country’s treasury. At the same time, health costs were climbing and people were out of work. And so in a time of war on terror, in Afghanistan and in Iraq, the country reduced its taxes monumentally. From massive surpluses in the ‘90s, the country’s deficits ballooned to unprecedented levels and will be left for somebody to wallow in later.

But the leaders of America’s exciting new economics shout into every TV camera available: No New Taxes. Let’s Tighten Our Belts.

Whose belts?

The off-shore corporate bookkeepers in the Caribbean? The new billionaires created by the tax cuts?

Not likely. Among the people who will have to tighten something are the 11 million uninsured children in this country; the retired workers who lost their pensions by decisions in the board, and more.

The business of don’t-you-dare bring up the idea of new taxes can become hypnotic and baffling. The governor of Minnesota, for example, got elected preaching no new taxes. So what we have today is a governor running around the state trying to cobble a state partnership with Native American gambling operators from northern Minnesota. The idea is to get the state into the casino business and to harvest a couple of hundred million bucks. While he is doing this, other native American tribes are yelling that their casino business in the populous southern Minnesota cities would suffer. So today the state of Minnesota has managed to pit Indians against Indians, who are equal parts of a culture that white politicians have historically demeaned. So to escape a slight bump in taxes to put the budget in order, he has found a way to ignite rivalries and start another kind of tribal war.

The repugnant part of this strategy is that it perverts the state’s obligation to perform services responsibly. There was a time when Minnesota led the country in responsible service. In those years, when it had to raise taxes to provide necessary services, it raised taxes. There was rarely any violent and partisan hair-tearing over it. If you wanted first-class and creative education, industry and medicine, you paid for it.

You didn’t dump it on people 40 years into the future, or pretend that the tax you were imposing was a fee, or shifted it onto another set of books.

The climate started changing when the self-described “taxpayers associations” began screaming that Minnesota taxes were driving industry out of the state and citizens into the poor house.

The citizens weren’t going into the poor house. And if some of the industries moved or put a branch operation into another state, the executives made sure they kept their homes in Minnesota, where their kids could go to school and be treated in Minnesota hospitals.

And now we try to do it by building casinos and cutting health care.

Moses, I think, would have dumped Commandment 11.

---Jim Klobuchar

Copyright (c) 2005 Jim Klobuchar