Beer ads try to connect with your lizard brain. They sneak signals past the prefrontal cortex to the places that deal with food, fear and sex. It's sneaky, but it works. A TV ad with quick movement, flashes of blood red, and bits of skin can send a lot of guys to the fridge for a beer.
The federal campaigns are aimed at the lizard brain, too. Not that any of the party leaders are using sex appeal, but they are staging mock battles that seem to be designed to bypass the higher brain functions of the electorate. Or maybe it isn't aimed at the electorate. Racing back and forth across the country and making threatening noises seems to go directly to the lizard brain of reporters, and the reporters seem to be responding to the election the way couch potatoes respond to beer ads.
The lizard brain isn't very good at sorting out party platforms and neither are the reporters. Tax policy is especially hard for the lizard brains to figure out.
Tax policy has to be processed in a part of the brain that lizards don't even have. Even the other monkeys; chimpanzees, apes, orangutans and baboons don't have enough gray matter up front to get their minds around carbon taxes, tariffs and the GST. In fact, it is pretty hard for the university students I teach.
How is a taxpayer supposed to understand the issues when the message is filtered though reporters who probably pay someone to fill in their income tax form?
Worse yet, the messages may be garbled to start with. It doesn't look to me as though many of our politicians can understand the tax system either.
Even Stéphane Dion, with his PhD, has a hard time explaining his carbon tax proposal to members of his own party.
In theory, they are at least willing to consider party policy. A politician opposed to changing the tax system doesn't have to explain taxes.
All he has to do is confuse people enough to keep them from understanding the policies proposed by the other parties.
So when Harper says the carbon tax will destroy the economy, he is not aiming at the prefrontal cortex.
He is trying to slip a scary signal through to the lizard brain. It is a trick that worked on the reporters at the Globe and Mail. The Globe made Harper's claim the front-page headline.
Buried in the back of the Globe was a response from Nancy Olewiler, one of Canada's leading environmental economists. Olewiler is director of the Public Policy Program at Simon Fraser University. She literally wrote the textbook on environmental policy. She was editor of Canadian Public Policy, the most respected policy journal in Canada.
She served on the federal Finance Minister's Technical Committee on Business Taxation. She is a director of B.C. Hydro.
Nancy Olewiler said Harper was wrong. Who do you believe?
Olewiler isn't the only highly qualified dissenter. Mark Jaccard, the economist who did the studies Harper seems to be using says Harper is wrong.
So does Gilber E. Metcalf, who wrote "A Green Employment Swap: Using a Carbon Tax to Finance Payroll Relief" for the prestigious Brookings Institute in the USA. So does Harvard economics textbook writer Greg Mankiw, a former Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors under President George W. Bush. And so do New York Times columnists David Brooks and Paul Krugman. Krugman is also a prominent economist like carbon tax supporters Thomas Friedman, Martin Feldstein and Nobel Prize winner Joe Stiglitz.
The point is that the carbon tax is good economics and has already been adopted by parties representing over 40 per cent of Canadian voters. The man who is trying to sell himself as a good economic manager is actually an economic dinosaur.
What should be front-page news is that Harper is either lying for political reasons or he doesn't understand how the economy works.
I am not sure which prospect scares me most.
Whichever it is, the national press has missed the real story. Meanwhile the future of Canada could be decided by our good old lizard brains.
Dave Robinson is an economist with the Institute for Northern Ontario Research at Laurentian University. drobinson@laurentian.ca
