Bonini’s signs really bug the shit out of me.
The the line: “it’s YOUR money” is pure GOP dog whistle racism and this is how it works.
The whole republican system is about nursing grievances. It is about division and, ginning up outrage. It is a strategy that is inherently un-American because the whole the point of Democracy is to come together in goodwill and solve problems. Coming together to solve problems is something we’ve been able to accomplish for two-hundred years.
Blessed with abundant material wealth, we’ve elected governments to plan for the future, deliberate and collectively implement beneficial projects. On the local, state and national level, we have instituted systems which pool our money in order to invest it in schools, infra-structure, research, and all manner of civilization building projects large and small. To paraphrase Oliver Wendell Holmes, we all chip in to have a civilized society. It is OUR money.
Republicans like Bonini are more interested in power than that are in civilization or even democracy. They have taken the cynical, divisive course of painting ALL taxes as theft. For Bonini all taxes are confiscatory. It is not OUR money. It is YOUR money, and that is where the racism comes in.
The Republican gripes and grievances theme is so baked into modern American politics that he does Bonini does not even need to make the racism explicit. The slogan “It is YOUR money” implies the grievance that all Republican politicians are playing on. It is YOUR money – don’t let THEM spend YOUR money on unworthy black and brown people. (Ronald Reagan, may you rot in hell for what you’ve wrought.)
It does not matter to Bonini that the US has the third lowest tax burden among Industrialized countries. (Only Ireland and Iceland, two countries that are now utterly insolvent, have lower personal taxes).
No, it is all about nursing racial grievances. Forget the fact that US corporate taxes are less than 1% of GDP. Bonini’s, “It’s YOUR money” BS is not about taxes. It is about race.
Is Bonini sending around pictures of the White House with watermelons growing on the South Lawn? Who knows. One thing is certain – he is not above using the GOP’s coded racism in this treasurers race.
UPDATE: For anyone who needs help contextualizing Bonini’s casual racism, I recommend reading this timely kos post:
It’s not surprising that this generation of Republicans has made a hero out of Joeseph McCarthy. They admire the way in which he cowed his enemies and the way in which he distorted the meaning of liberty. They admire him because he generated fear.
The question of “have you no sense of decency” has been answered. They do not — at least not one that rises above their hunger for power.