The Time Tax

No one seems to have noticed that Tuesday's election results tended to vindicate the judgment of the US Supreme Court in their Citizens United decision. Corporations lie just like people do and money speaks lies just like people do.

The election also showed that we as a people have gotten an awful lot of practice in deciphering and ignoring corporate lies. We are barraged with these lies daily on television, radio, and phone and in newspapers, magazines, and email. If we hadn't learned to protect ourselves from corporate speech we would be much poorer than we are.

The net result is that our business moguls wasted billions of dollars trying to buy an election just as they regularly waste billions of dollars trying to influence our purchases. Not that they don't sometimes succeed, of course. No amount of education will help some citizens. But enough of us knew how to sort the wheat from the chaff that the nation was saved from four years of corporate presidency.

The corporate billionaires could have shaped the outcome of the election to their liking if they were wise enough. All they had to do was donate all that money to charity in the name of their favored candidates. The 47 percent would have roused themselves to vote for their benefactors. But why would the electorate want to vote for the people who for months had tortured them interminably with lying ads?

Advertising is basically a tax we pay for our entertainment and news. Those of us who watch PBS are spared from most of the advertising by simply paying for the service with our taxes. But if you prefer to watch a football game, Fox News, Two and a Half Men or Stephen Colbert (my favorite) you pay the tax with your time. Granted that you can use that time to learn how to parse corporate lies, it is still a terrible waste.