Posted on 06/23/2002 7:20:20 PM PDT by ATOMIC_PUNK
Politics: Lawmakers deal with constituent gullibility
WASHINGTON (June 23, 2002 3:05 p.m. EDT) - Congress has a hard enough time coping with the real world. Constituents clinging to the make-believe don't make it any easier.
Consider the myths California's Central Valley residents have tendered as true in recent months. There's the one about slavery reparation checks, $10,000 or more ready for the asking. Or the perennial legislation known as "Bill 602P" that will impose new taxes on Internet use.
Or the truth behind airplane contrails.
Some Valley and Sierra Nevada foothill residents consider those white streaks in the sky evidence of airborne hazardous waste dumping by the Air Force. They want Congress to get it stopped, now.
"I contacted the Department of Defense and they assured me that the Air Force does not dump hazardous waste within the contrails of an aircraft," says Rep. George Radanovich, R-Calif. "They informed me that there is a scientifically proven reason the vapor trails remain in the air long after the aircraft is gone."
Just for the record, contrails come from high altitude ice crystals formed when water vapor is ejected as part of a jet engine's exhaust fumes. Radanovich offers this explanation in the form letter his office prepared in response to repeated questions.
But the very fact that Radanovich needed a form letter illustrates the spread and persistence of such myths. Particularly in the age of the Internet, rumors concerning the federal government can quickly become accepted as fact.
"The Internet is kind of a hyper-drive for information exchange, so urban legends can happen a lot faster and be a lot more ubiquitous," noted David Engle, a professor of German and Folklore at California State University at Fresno.
Engle added that the Internet, because "it's very easy to cut and paste," has also accelerated the transmission of identical versions of stories. Instead of the standard folklore tradition of individuals shaping and giving local spin to yarns as they spread them by word of mouth, the Internet facilitates multiple, identical replications.
The federal government incites only a fraction of the tall tales. They can be particularly heart-stopping, though, because of what they show the public is willing to believe about their representatives. For instance, e-mails collected by the Internet site TruthOrFiction.com warned of a Senate bill requiring taxpayers to register their handguns on the annual 1040 tax return.
There was a bill, but, as TruthOrFiction.com pointed out, it would not have required gun registration.
The most persistent of the myths, like the one about Air Force contrails, force lawmakers to invest time and money in knocking them down. For instance, several Valley congressmen have posted on their Web sites information about the mythical e-mail surcharge.
Radanovich and Rep. Cal Dooley, D-Calif., are among those who have posted Internet denunciations of the "Bill 602P" story. The "Congressman Tony Schnell" who supposedly authored the legislation does not exist.
Nonetheless, in spurts and waves over the past three years, the "Bill 602P" hoax has prompted numerous questions to California lawmakers.
"We got a lot on that," said Doug Heye, press secretary for Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif. "Once it started, it snowballed pretty quickly."
The supposed Internet tax prompted 141 congressmen in 1999, including Pombo and California Republican Doug Ose, to co-author a bill called the Internet Access Charge Prohibition Act. Though the lawmakers knew "Bill 602P" was a hoax, they wanted voters to appreciate their own anti-tax position.
It also became a topic in an October 2000 campaign debate between a veteran GOP congressman and then-First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.
"(It's) an example of the government's greedy hand in trying to take money from taxpayers that frankly it has no right to," New York Republican Senate candidate Rick Lazio said when asked about the supposed bill. "We need to keep the government's hands off the Internet."
Sometimes, legislative legends stem not from hoaxes but from rabble-rousing, spiced by confusion about what legislative language means.
Eight years ago, for instance, Rush Limbaugh warned that Congress was about to require licensing of parents who home-school their children. The news shocked parents of the roughly 100,000 home-schooled children in California, as well as others nationwide; the resulting flood of phone calls shut down the Capitol Hill switchboard.
Lawmakers insisted that they never intended to impose such licensing, and that their legislative language would not have required it. Nonetheless, they felt compelled to explicitly specify that fact in the education bill being debated.
The prospect of free money can also seduce reason.
Staffers for Rep. Gary Condit, D-Calif., say they have received in recent months at least a half dozen phone calls or letters from black constituents who are ready to receive their slavery reparation checks. Similarly, Radanovich's staffers report fielding questions about which tax form should be filed to receive reparations.
This belief became widespread enough that members of the Congressional Black Caucus took to the airwaves to say the supposed reparations were strictly imaginary. Some 80,000 taxpayers filed for the supposed reparations tax credit this year, the Internal Revenue Service noted in February.
There is no such credit, nor are reparations available. But as Dooley's chief of staff, Merced, Calif., native Lisa Quigley, noted, this is also one legislative legend with a complicated relationship to the truth.
There has been talk of reparations. Dooley and 35 other House members are currently supporting H.R. 40, which calls for a study of slavery and the possibility of reparations. Moreover, the Washington Post reported earlier this year that the IRS mistakenly paid out at least $30 million to those filing bogus reparations tax credit claims. Many of them were sought by taxpayers who gave a portion of the money to promoters.
"These snake-oil salesmen build false hopes and charge good people bad advice on reparation refunds," IRS Commissioner Charles Rossotti said earlier this year. "In the end, the victims discover their refund claims are rejected and their money and the promoters are long gone."
"These snake-oil salesmen build false hopes and charge good people bad advice on reparation refunds," IRS Commissioner Charles Rossotti
Snake-oil salesmen,,,,, pot tells kettle that he's black like him.
"Congress creates 3,000 new laws and regulations each year, claiming they're must have laws that people and society can't live without. Yet how is it that for years and decades prior to each year's 3,000 new laws we not only survived but increased prosperity? And we do that despite a mountain of laws that we're already saddled with. Thirty new laws a year is probably overkill. But 3,000 is insane.
"Seems obvious enough to me that lobbyists and special interest groups seeking to buy access to government power in order to gain unfair competitive advantages would be non existent if politicians weren't putting government power up for sale in the first place. They sell the "little guys" snake oil while they sell access to government power to their cronies."
The most persistent of the myths, like the one about Air Force contrails, force lawmakers to invest time and money in knocking them down.
Several people have said that if we paid congresspersons to stay home and do nothing prosperity would rapidly increase. I'll settle for members of congress chasing after crop circles and contrails if they'll stop creating new laws.
"Government intervention into peaceful, private activity -- free association wherein any or all parties are free to walk away -- will make things worse rather than better.
"Any government agency that is a value to the people and society could better serve the people by being in the private sector where competition demands maximum performance."56
Wrong. They do not "DEAL" with it; they "COUNT" on it. The Democrat mantra is, "the only good voter is a dumb one, though dead ones are slightly preferable."
Congressman Billybob
Careful - an awful lot of these myths get posted here on FR as fact.
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