Beer ads and tax policy.

• Author: Robinson, Dave
• Position: ECONOMICALLY SPEAKING

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.

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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 Stephane 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 frontpage headline.

Buried in the back of the Globe was a response from Nancy Olewiler, one of Canada's leading environmental...