Confronting the Hollow Men

T.S. Eliot's 1925 poem, The Hollow Men, says "the way the world ends" is "not with a bang, but a whimper." If Eliot were writing today, the hollow men might be America's conservative ideologues, the world that of the national anti-tax movement, and the whimper the one barely heard on September 12, 2007.

That day, Roll Call, the tiny-circulation Washington newspaper, reported that Republican senators were fretting about "new polling data showing tax cuts are no longer priority No. 1" with voters. One senior GOP aide admitted that when it comes to tax cuts, "We've worn out the message."

That Republicans' 30-year anti-tax revolution could ebb with such little fanfare is a testament to how fast public attitudes about taxes are evolving.

In 2005, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found most Americans believe President Bush's tax cuts "have not been worth it because they have increased the deficit and caused cuts in government programs." That same year, a Los Angeles Times survey found a majority believe the best way to stimulate the economy is not through "returning money to taxpayers through tax cuts" but through "spending for improvements to the country's infrastructure." By 2007, a New York Times/CBS News poll found most Americans would accept higher taxes to pay for public investments.

The country has stopped listening to the anti-tax hollow men whose ideology puts regressive tax cuts before responsible public investment. That shift is due to events both sensational and mundane.

We have all seen horrifying television images of underfunded infrastructure — from bridges collapsing to steam pipes exploding to cities blacking out. Similarly, we have all experienced firsthand the negative consequences of resource-starved government services — from potholes that go unfilled to long lines at the Division of Motor Vehicles.

And as public opinion has changed, so have politicians.

Take Minnesota, a closely divided political bellwether. Earlier this year, the Democratic legislature sent Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R) a bill to boost the state's gasoline taxes from among the lowest in the nation in order to upgrade bridges and roads. After Pawlenty vetoed that bill and Minneapolis' I-35 bridge subsequently fell into the Mississippi River, the governor reversed himself on the tax issue.

Pawlenty, of course, is not the only Republican hollow man frantically backtracking.

Idaho's Butch Otter (R) — one of the decade's most anti-tax members of Congress — is now as governor floating a similar tax hike to upgrade his state's transportation system.

Here in Colorado, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper is championing a ballot measure that would slightly raise property tax rates to pay for improvements to public infrastructure. He is joined by Gov. Bill Ritter (D), who nixed upcoming property tax cuts and froze current rates in order to let schools keep more resources. Both men realize that financially neglecting public priorities has become more politically and substantively dangerous as opposing the anti-tax hollow men, even in the traditionally tax-averse Rocky Mountain region.

Now, in Congress, a group of House Democrats led by Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., is proposing to attach a "war tax" to President Bush's $190 billion Iraq spending bill. Their goal is two-fold: 1) Force the nation to confront the astronomical cost of this war 2) Stop war expenses from serving as the Bush administration's excuse to slash every other federal priority.

Not surprisingly, all of these efforts have met with the hollow men's outdated anti-tax bromides.

In Minnesota, Republican leaders have called the Democrats' tax proposal a "pocket-picking mechanism." In Colorado, the right-wing Independence Institute called Ritter's property tax freeze "fiscal date rape," while Denver's lone Republican city councilor attacked Hickenlooper's bond initiative as "a tax increase" — as if that alone is reason for voters to consider opposing it. Meanwhile, House Republican Leader John Boehner (Ohio) belittled congressional Democrats' war tax proposal as a plan to "raid every taxpayer's wallet."

These sound bites may yet prevail in some skirmishes, but Democrats' offensive at the same time they are winning more elections signals that the public is rejecting the hollow men's anti-tax mantra of "every man for himself" in favor of progressives' motto that "we're all in this together." The term "tax and spend," long an effective epithet, has become a positive, can-do brand of "invest and responsibly finance." Or, put more colloquially, "You get what you pay for."

And though the anti-tax hollow men will keep pining for their greed-is-good glory days, America will be better off for the change.

Writer and political analyst David Sirota is the bestselling author of "Hostile Takeover: How Big Money and Corruption Conquered Our Government & How We Take It Back." His daily blog can be found at www.workingassetsblog.com/sirota. To find out more about David Sirota and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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