6 Degrees of Truth Ending 6 GOP Lies.

In a Rolling Stone article titled “Six Studies That Show Everything Republicans Believe is Wrong: It's time for the right wing to stop lying about the minimum wage, taxes, global warming and more,” we’re finally getting around to telling right wingers what we should have been saying all along-the truth. But instead, the media decided some time ago to treat the truth and BS the same, out of respect to the clueless and to appear neutral to the point of silliness.

My simple truth is: If you treat snake oil salesmen like doctors, you get a lot of snake oil doctors:

1. The Minimum Wage Doesn't Kill Jobs: In the early Nineties, David Card and Alan Krueger found "no evidence that the rise in New Jersey's minimum wage reduced employment at fast-food restaurants in the state." The most comprehensive meta-study of the minimum wage examined 64 studies and found "little or no evidence" that a higher minimum wage reduces employment.

2. The Stimulus Created Millions of Jobs: The Republican belief that markets are always good and government is always bad led them to argue that diverting resources to the public sector this way would have disastrous results. They were wrong: The stimulus worked, with the most reliable studies finding that it created millions of jobs. 

3. Taxing The Rich Doesn't Hurt Economic Growth: Republicans believe that the wealthy are the vehicles of economic growth … investment is driven by demand, not supply; if there are viable investments to be made, they will be made regardless of tax rates … Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, two of the eminent economists of inequality, find no correlation between marginal tax rates and economic growth. Inequality reduces the incomes of the middle class, and therefore demand, which in turn stunts growth. 

4. Global Warming is caused by Humans: James Powell finds that over a one year period, 2,258 articles on global warming were published by 9,136 authors. Of those, only one, from the Herald of the Russian Academy of Sciences, rejected man-made global warming. That one article was likely motivated by the Russian government's interest in exploiting arctic shale. Another, even more comprehensive study, examining 11,944 studies over a 10-year period, finds that 97 percent of scientists accepted the scientific consensus that man-made global warming is occurring.

5. The Affordable Care Act is Working: President Obama's centrist healthcare bill was informed by federalism (delegating power to the states) … Republicans, undeterred, decried it as Soviet-style communism based on "death panels" – never mind the fact that the old system, which rationed care based on income, is the one that left tens of thousands of uninsured people to die. From the beginning, Republicans have predicted disastrous consequences or Obamacare, none of which came true. It's worth noting that every time the CBO estimates how much Obamacare will cost, the number gets lower. Odd how we've never heard Republicans say that.

6. Rich people are no better than the rest of us: Politicians on the right like to pretend that having money is a sign of hard work and morality – and that not having money is a sign of laziness. This story is contradicted by human experience and many religious traditions … But it's also contradicted by the facts – more and more rich people are getting their money through inheritances, and science shows that they are no more benevolent than others.

Election was a vote to tax rich. Now, watch the cartoon.

Wisconsin cartoonist Mike Konopacki is back in this nice animation that attempts to pass along what is obvious to most of us, except those dense hapless conservative voters, we've got a wealth gap problem.

Tax the rich: An animated fairy tale, is narrated by Ed Asner, with animation by Mike Konopacki. Written and directed by Fred Glass for the California Federation of Teachers. An 8 minute video about how we arrived at this moment of poorly funded public services and widening economic inequality. Things go downhill in a happy and prosperous land after the rich decide they don't want to pay taxes anymore. They tell the people that there is no alternative, but the people aren't so sure. This land bears a startling resemblance to our land. For more info, www.cft.org.

Millionaire Nick Hanauer Wants Higher Taxes, makes his case!

This is a must see for everyone. I didn't know about it until my wildly conservative friend alerted me to it. He was almost convinced.

I'm hoping a few other conservatives will eventually take some time to watch millionaire Nick Hanauer explain in the simplest terms, why he and others like him should pay higher taxes.

This is one of the best presentations I've seen to date, and it's off the cuff and from the heart.

 

Paul Ryan's Economic Double Speak Intentionally Confusing and Unworkable. He's knows it.

Help me, please...help!

I know Paul Ryan pulled a fast one, it's just insane explaining how he did it. While describing the individual tax rates small business owners will pay under Obama’s plan for those making over $200,000, he told Mike Gousha that Canada has a business tax rate of 15 percent, which is…oops, comparing apples to oranges. He just slipped it in there. Ryan first started talking about individual taxes, then out of nowhere, compared that to Canada’s corporate rate, which is 15 percent (but it’s not that simple either).

By the way, Canada’s personal income tax on anything over $132,000, is 29 percent, not the corporate tax rate he mentioned.  

Ryan intentionally confuses the matter by introducing comparisons to other countries. Then Ryan switches U.S. corporate tax rates with dividend income added on, I think, totaling upwards of 45 percent...my head hurts. Needless to say, Ryan intentionally jumbles unrelated numbers just to sound wonkish, and confuse everyone. 

Washington Post Fact Check: 4/15/11: Only 3 percent of all “small businesses” paying taxes would be affected by Obama’s plan … That group — about 750,000 taxpayers — accounts for 50 percent of the estimated $1 trillion in business income reported in 2011. The other 97 percent of “small businesses” shared the rest — and under Obama’s plan, they would get to keep their Bush-era tax cuts.

In fact, many of these businesses are huge, and just as many don’t employ anyone at all:

Michelle Dimarob, a senior adviser to the House Ways & Means Committee, noted, “…bakeries, law firms or otherwise — are providing jobs to people. If taxes go up, then they will have less income to provide jobs and pay people.”

But many of those “small businesses” are just individuals, who don’t have employees and aren’t job creators. That’s part of the Ryan deception. The small business truth is getting lost over time. The truth is provided below by an actual small business man:

Income that passes through to owners is what would get taxed more heavily. Income that stays in the business, and is used to pay new employees, etc., is not taxed at all for the owners. A higher personal income tax rate is an *incentive* to hiring more people and investing more in a business to make it grow, because you’re leveraging pre-tax money.

I find it hard to believe, that a company looks at the tax savings, and decides it can hire another employee. An employee is a cost necessary to produce revenues, not typically an investment. If the company thinks the employee will contribute to greater revenues, it will hire the employee.

Incidentally, the cost of the employee is expensed, so if it is a wash, there is no tax impact. If it is a net loss, even less tax is paid. If there is a profit, more tax is paid, but the company still comes out ahead. The tax rates are not particularly relevant. In fact, hiring more employees, increasing the expense of the workforce might be the ironic result of higher rates. I have never seen a new hire occur because the employer has a little extra cash to spend.

Tax cuts for wealthy Good! Tax cuts for everyone else Bad!

Rachel Maddow lays it out so well that even a tea party voter will understand how hypocritical they've been...

Paul Ryan says Tax Cuts Appear to be disappointing because "growth occurs on the margin." Beyond human sight?

This guy cannot be taken seriously ever again. Rep. Paul Ryan can't answer the tough questions without injecting ideological theory and fabricated economic outcomes that could only happen in Bizarro World (as seen in Superman comics, where everything means just the opposite). 

For ten years the highly touted Bush tax policies have been in place, deregulation has not been reigned in, yet jobs aren't being created and the economy has stalled. So we should make it worse, according to Ryan, by continuing these failed policies?

The Atlantic: Rep. Paul Ryan blasted the Democrats' plan to raise taxes on millionaires … In (an) interview at the Washington Ideas Forum with David Leonhardt of the New York Times, Leonhardt questioned the idea that lowering taxes was a panacea for growth. Taxes increases didn't prevent growth in the 1990s, he said, and tax cuts produced disappointing growth in the 2000s.

Ryan responded that "growth occurs on the margin" and when you raise taxes on work, savings, and investment, you get less work, less savings, and less investment -- and less growth.

On the margin? Does he mean out of sight for the common man, or beyond human understanding?

And finally, let’s put a stake through the heart of the “say it enough and it’s true” BS that taxing work, savings and investments discourages anything…at all. It’s a Paul Ryan lie, used to market voodoo economic snake oil. What is it with the press too?

Leonhardt started with common sense math, and never followed up with a question about the mythical “penalizing success” hokum. Caught in a place called "reality," Ryan actually blamed other factors for the roaring 90’s, factors brought about by Clinton’s tax increase. Doh!

In the 1990s, Ryan added, other factors such as stable interest rates and a productivity boom helped to compensate for higher tax rates on income and capital.

Has it ever been more obvious that Ryan is now just spinning his psycho babble wheels?

Democrats Propose Income Equity Act to Republican Corporate Whores.

I don't know how big a laugh the Democrats will get for their new proposal, but presenting a strong alternative to selling government out to the biggest business can only help stop this slide into creeping fascism: 

State Representative Mark Pocan and State Senator Fred Risser today circulated a bill that would limit government tax deductions to corporations with inflated chief executive officer pay. Pocan said, “I believe that if a corporation wants to get a $1 million tax deduction from our state, they should have to earn it by paying a fair wage.”

Current law allows a corporation to deduct up to $1 million from its income tax for its executive officer. The Income Equity Act would link the government tax deduction to the salary of the company’s lowest paid full-time employee. Corporations would be allowed to qualify for a deduction up to 25 times its lowest paid full-time employee. Thus, if the lowest paid employee earned $15,000 per year, the corporations would be allowed to claim a $375,000 deduction. Pocan and Risser first introduced the bill in 1999 when Pocan was a freshman.