I mean, sure they might make mistakes and get things wrong once in a while, but they wouldn't be maliciously deceptive or try to actively mislead the public.
Except... They do. Constantly. And they're doing it in a depressingly coordinated way at this point.
The bevy of "fact checks" and "experts" justifying the massive expansion of the IRS is nothing more than a bunch of garbage, dishonest and outright malicious actors trying to run cover for a spending bill that was, itself, dishonest and malicious. Like the giant corporate welfare program to "fight climate change", the IRS expansion that got included in the absurdly named Inflation Reduction Act was just something Democrats and their cronies in big business and the establishment bureaucracies already wanted to do.
It wasn't part of some thoughtful, intelligent plan actually designed to fight inflation - and of course, to the contrary, it will only make that problem worse as the one thing government could actually do to reduce inflation is stop spending so much goddamn money that doesn't yet exist. But as long as know-nothing hacks in media are willing to write articles justifying this shit, and as long as our social media companies are promoting outright lies and calling it "fact", these problems will continue to be hard to fight.
What's most bizarre about all this is just that I can't really understand how it even still works.
Going back to the paradigm I want to believe in, surely most adults can see through the facade, right? I mean, it should not be a partisan issue for everyone to recognize that the government is lying to the public about why they want to expand the tax collection agency. Surely everyone knows that it's not just going to be the richest people who get targeted for audits - especially when, in fact, the overwhelming majority of audits today are on poor people. Surely most people can see that creating and spending trillions of dollars that didn't previously exist while locking down the productive sector of the economy was the cause of the increase in prices for pretty much everything that's currently crushing our standards of living.
Right?
Sadly, the paradigm I most want to believe about the world and about the majority of people's intelligence, honesty, and self-awareness does not seem to be supported by the evidence.