America Haters at Fox News Hosts Pollster Who is Paid To Make Up Smears About Health Care Reform

America Haters at Fox News Hosts Pollster Who is Paid To Make Up Smears About Health Care Reform

You may recall GOP pollster Frank Luntz's recently released a 28-page memo, "The Language of Healthcare 2009: The 10 Rules for Stopping the 'Washington Takeover' of Healthcare," which is intended to help conservatives defeat President Obama and congressional Democrats' health-care reform initiatives.  As we've noted over the past two weeks, Fox News has provided a forum for the Luntz talking points while Politico hyped his memo and downplayed a progressive pollster’s pro-health care reform memo.

Well, now it seems Luntz doesn't want anyone asking who paid for his "10 rules" memo.  Via Huffington Post's Sam Stein:

    Conservative communications guru Frank Luntz has written the playbook for GOP opposition to the Obama administration's health care proposal. His plan, which is heavy on framing the president's proposal as a government "takeover," is already popping up in statements from top congressional Republicans and on Fox News, despite the fact that no Democratic legislation has been proposed.

    But when it comes to discussing who funded his messaging, the wordsmith Luntz is notably devoid of words. Asked about his funder in an interview with the New York Times Magazine to be published on Sunday, Luntz was close-lipped:

    Q Who paid you to write the health care memo?

    A It's not relevant.

    Q A pharmaceutical company?

    A No pharmaceutical company was involved.

Riiiiiiight, it's not relevant who paid for the memo – a memo with talking points now being parroted by Fox News and other conservative media outlets and figures.  I know it may be a bit of a stretch to expect Luntz to understand that this is an issue about his credibility as a pollster – if he has any left – but it's the right thing to do.

 Luntz was one of the so-called experts used by the anti-American conservative movement to spread the falsehood about health care reform being socialism. That was found to be one of Poltifacts lies of the year. Unfortunately or fortunately depending on your point of view, health care reform or the ACA was a free market solution.

Over The Last Forty Years America Has Often Followed The Path of Conservative Economic Policy - That Path Has Come Back to Haunt The Middle-Class

Over The Last Forty Years America Has Often Followed The Path of Conservative Economic Policy - That Path Has Come Back to Haunt The Middle-Class

A few weeks ago, as the Occupy Wall Street protests were first spreading, something amazing happened: For 10 whole seconds, the local reporter on my TV screen actually talked about the realities of the recession. He even uttered the phrase “economic inequality.”

My guess is that you’ve seen something similar on your local affiliate — and that’s no minor event. When even the most local of television journalists are compelled to acknowledge this crushing emergency in a country whose media aggressively promotes American dream agitprop, it means the Occupy protesters have scored a monumental victory. You can almost imagine a Wall Street CEO turning to an aide and muttering a slightly altered riff off LBJ: “If we’ve lost Ron Burgundy, we’ve lost Middle America.”

In response to this stunning turn of events, conservative politicians are retreating to non sequiturs. They seem to think that if they shout the phrase “class warfare” enough, the nation will go back to not caring about the divide between the rich and poor.

But something has changed.

For most of the post-World War II era, we tolerated relatively high inequality because we envisioned it as a necessary side effect of an exceptional economy that (supposedly) guaranteed opportunities for advancement. As the Wall Street Journal put it, we believed that “it is OK to have ever-greater differences between rich and poor … as long as (our) children have a good chance of grasping the brass ring.”

However, the last three decades have invalidated our standing hypothesis. After the conservatives’ successful assault on the New Deal, America has lived a different reality — one perfectly summarized by a new Federal Reserve study revealing that today’s increasing inequality accompanies comparatively low social mobility.

“U.S. family income mobility has decreased over the 1969-2006 time span, and especially since the 1980s,” notes the Fed paper, adding that “a family’s position at (the) end of (the) 2000s was … more correlated with its start position than was the case 20 years earlier.”

Of course, some class mobility still exists. The trouble is that it’s primarily of the downward kind. As the Pew Charitable Trusts reports, roughly a third of those who grew up in the middle class have now fallen below that station in adulthood.

This is why, for all the right-wing mythology about “Eurosocialism” snuffing out upward mobility, data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development show that social mobility in uber-capitalist America is actually lower than in most industrialized countries.

This is why almost three-quarters of respondents just told the Hill newspaper’s pollsters that income inequality is a problem.

This is why my local TV news is suddenly airing pieces on economic inequality between sports, weather and all the “you stay classy” small talk.

And this is why, among all the fights over economic policy, the debate about taxes is the most crucial of all.

As the Fed noted in a separate report, the federal tax code — which remains vaguely progressive — has been the one proven way to “mitigate income inequality.” But with congressional Republicans gradually flattening federal income tax rates and with already-regressive state tax rates in GOP bastions like Texas, Wyoming, Tennessee, South Dakota and Mississippi, the tax system has lately been preserving or exacerbating existing inequality.

David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book "Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now."

Conservatives have been hyper shrill lately. Claiming that a return of the tax rates of the prosperous Clinton years will be a return to Marxism or even the end of our civilization. You can't reason with people like that, people who have clearly gone off the deep end. They seemed to have taken the zealotry of some religious cults to and applied it to economics. They believe what they believe and they want no part of being rational adults.

The Conservative Redistribution of Income is Grand Theft for Plutocrats

Here(chart), from the CBO report, are the changes, in percentage points, of the shares of income going to three groups. The top quintile excluding the top 1 percent – which is basically the abode of the well-educated who aren’t among the very lucky few – has only kept pace with the overall growth in incomes. Just about all of the redistribution has taken place from the bottom 80 to the top 1 (and we know that most of that has actually gone to the top 0.1).

 Oligarchy, American Style

Inequality is back in the news, largely thanks to Occupy Wall Street, but with an assist from the Congressional Budget Office. And you know what that means: It’s time to roll out the obfuscators! [Here, from the CBO report, are the changes, in percentage points, of the shares of income going to three groups. The top quintile excluding the top 1 percent – which is basically the abode of the well-educated who aren’t among the very lucky few – has only kept pace with the overall growth in incomes. Just about all of the redistribution has taken place from the bottom 80 to the top 1 (and we know that most of that has actually gone to the top 0.1).]

Anyone who has tracked this issue over time knows what I mean. Whenever growing income disparities threaten to come into focus, a reliable set of defenders tries to bring back the blur. Think tanks put out reports claiming that inequality isn’t really rising, or that it doesn’t matter. Pundits try to put a more benign face on the phenomenon, claiming that it’s not really the wealthy few versus the rest, it’s the educated versus the less educated.

So what you need to know is that all of these claims are basically attempts to obscure the stark reality: We have a society in which money is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few people, and in which that concentration of income and wealth threatens to make us a democracy in name only.

The budget office laid out some of that stark reality in a recent report, which documented a sharp decline in the share of total income going to lower- and middle-income Americans. We still like to think of ourselves as a middle-class country. But with the bottom 80 percent of households now receiving less than half of total income, that’s a vision increasingly at odds with reality.

In response, the usual suspects have rolled out some familiar arguments: the data are flawed (they aren’t); the rich are an ever-changing group (not so); and so on. The most popular argument right now seems, however, to be the claim that we may not be a middle-class society, but we’re still an upper-middle-class society, in which a broad class of highly educated workers, who have the skills to compete in the modern world, is doing very well.

It’s a nice story, and a lot less disturbing than the picture of a nation in which a much smaller group of rich people is becoming increasingly dominant. But it’s not true.

Workers with college degrees have indeed, on average, done better than workers without, and the gap has generally widened over time. But highly educated Americans have by no means been immune to income stagnation and growing economic insecurity. Wage gains for most college-educated workers have been unimpressive (and nonexistent since 2000), while even the well-educated can no longer count on getting jobs with good benefits. In particular, these days workers with a college degree but no further degrees are less likely to get workplace health coverage than workers with only a high school degree were in 1979.

So who is getting the big gains? A very small, wealthy minority.

The budget office report tells us that essentially all of the upward redistribution of income away from the bottom 80 percent has gone to the highest-income 1 percent of Americans. That is, the protesters who portray themselves as representing the interests of the 99 percent have it basically right, and the pundits solemnly assuring them that it’s really about education, not the gains of a small elite, have it completely wrong.

If anything, the protesters are setting the cutoff too low. The recent budget office report doesn’t look inside the top 1 percent, but an earlier report, which only went up to 2005, found that almost two-thirds of the rising share of the top percentile in income actually went to the top 0.1 percent — the richest thousandth of Americans, who saw their real incomes rise more than 400 percent over the period from 1979 to 2005.

Who’s in that top 0.1 percent? Are they heroic entrepreneurs creating jobs? No, for the most part, they’re corporate executives.

 Republicans - who really should be called the Right-wing Elitist Party - tells us that to complain about this redistribution of income from the working class to millionaires is socialism. Don't fall for that old canard. America has become an economy that gives rich people money just for being rich not because they worked for it. They get that wealth from where all wealth starts, from average Americans producing goods and services. The 1% are the leeches and the 99% are the producers.

Banana Republic Democracy In Wisconsin Guns Welcome Cameras Excluded

Banana Republic Democracy In Wisconsin Guns Welcome Cameras Excluded

Eighteen people were arrested Tuesday for using cameras in the Wisconsin Assembly gallery, including the editor of The Progressive magazine, Matt Rothschild.

Rothschild and others had gone to the capitol to protest a series of arrests in recent weeks of individuals who carried signs or took photos or video in defiance of an Assembly ban.

"We ought to have a right to take a picture," Rothschild said.
Guns, Yes. Cameras, No.

The protest was organized through a Facebook event called "Concealed Camera Day at the Capitol!" The event coincided with the implementation of Wisconsin's new concealed carry law, which allows residents to carry a concealed firearm -- including inside the Assembly gallery.

Stephen Colbert said Governor Walker was bringing "a new freedom to America's dairyland" with the concealed carry law, but said people would not see "images of gunfire in the statehouse" because of the camera ban. "Thank God. Cameras are dangerous," he said.

On the agenda in Tuesday's session was a bill to institute the Castle Doctrine, a "shoot first, ask questions later" bill that gives a person immunity from civil and criminal liability if they shoot another in self defense in their home, work, or vehicle. The American Legislative Exchange Council also has a model Castle Doctrine bill -- see the side-by-side here.

Event organizers were clear that the protests were not about the gun laws, but instead about protecting First Amendment rights.
But is it Legal?

The Open Meetings law includes this provision (§19.90):

    "Use of equipment in open session. Whenever a governmental body holds a meeting in open session, the body shall make a reasonable effort to accommodate any person desiring to record, film or photograph the meeting. This section does not permit recording, filming or photographing such a meeting in a manner that interferes with the conduct of the meeting or the rights of the participants."

The statute also contains this provision (§ 19.87(2)):

    "No provision of this subchapter which conflicts with a rule of the senate or assembly or joint rule of the legislature shall apply to a meeting conducted in compliance with such rule."

The legal issue here appears similar to the one that arose in the challenge to Governor Walker's collective bargaining law. In that case, Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne alleged that the union-busting law should be struck down because it was passed in violation of another provision of the Open Meetings law requiring notice. In part, Ozanne's challenge failed because the legislature had passed a rule that trumped the Open Meetings law.

Likewise, here the Assembly had a rule banning cameras and video, but under the court's ruling in the Ozanne suit, that rule trumped the Open Meetings law permitting their use.

Despite this, both the Wisconsin and U.S. Constitutions have provisions protecting the right to free speech, free assembly, and a free press. "The gallery is a free speech area," says attorney Jim Mueller, who was ticketed in October for violating the Assembly rule. "Even if there are rules against signs, they're unconstitutional. It is our right to peaceably assemble and petition the government."

If we said how funny it was that Governor Walker and other Rethugicans allowed guns but no sunshine from the free press, we would be mistaken in thinking this is some kind of weird aberration of the the Soviet Union's old Politburo here in the U.S. There is nothing strange here. Republicans know that the greatest threat to their anti-American, anti-Democracy agenda is letting the public know what they're doing. Sunshine, like that brought by cameras and recorders is the kind of disinfectant that conservatives know will shine a light on their shady corrupt style of gov'mint. 

How OWS Has Exposed the Militarization of US Law Enforcement

How OWS Has Exposed the Militarization of US Law Enforcement

As the number of Occupy Wall Street arrests nears 1,000, instances of police brutality continue to pile up. Felix Rivera-Pitre was punched in the face in New York during a march through the city’s financial district; Ryan Hadar was dragged out of the street by his thumbs at Occupy San Francisco; and at Occupy Boston, members of Veterans for Peace were shoved to the ground and dragged away for chanting and peacefully occupying a local park.

These efforts to intimidate the protesters are symptoms of three decades of policies that have militarized civilian law enforcement. Sgt. Shamar Thomas, a U.S. marine at the Occupy Wall Street protests, was so appalled by the behavior of the NYPD that he loudly confronted a group of 30 officers, shouting at them:

    "This is not a war zone. These are unarmed people. It does not make you tough to hurt these people. If you want to go fight, go to Iraq or Afghanistan. Stop hurting these people, man, why y’all doing this to our people? Why are y’all gearing up like this is war? There are no bullets flying out here."

Police repression in America is hardly new. Low-income neighborhoods, communities of color and political activists have always had to deal with unneccassary shows of force by some police officers. Thanks to a populist uprising threatening a status quo that benefits the top tier of American society to the detriment of the bottom 99 percent, many Americans for the first time are witnessing the U.S. police state in action.

As Occupation Spreads, So Does the Police State

A clear pattern has emerged in the response to occupations throughout the country, from San Francisco to Denver, involving midnight raids by heavily armed paramilitary units of riot police deployed to enforce park curfews.

Protesters at Occupy San Francisco are familiar with the routine. They have endured multiple late-night police raids on their encampment in Justin Herman Plaza, the most brutal of which took place Sunday, Oct. 16. Minutes before midnight and with the approval of Mayor Ed Lee (who is currently running for reelection and claims to be supportive of the movement's overall message), 70 police officers decked out in full riot gear marched into the encampment to enforce a 10pm curfew. They dismantled tents, tarps, the medical station and the kitchen, along with some personal belongings, all of which were loaded onto Department of Public Works trucks.

Some 200 protesters resisted peacefully, locking arms to prevent the police invasion, which was met with a frighteningly violent response. According to the San Francisco Bay Guardian, one protester received a lengthy beat-down for duct-taping his body to a pole inside the camp. The police allegedly "ripped him off the pole, threw him to the ground and struck him in the head and ribs. When he left by ambulance a few hours later, he appeared to be convulsing or seizing," reported the Bay Guardian.

Protesters using their bodies to block the DPW trucks from leaving were dragged out of the street, some by their fingers and thumbs. Those who locked arms to form a human chain were pulled apart and thrown onto the sidewalk. 

America's police departments might want to ask themselves - what are you going to do when they come for you. Most police in the US belong to unions. Who is going to defend your rights to organize. Who is going to defend your right to collective bargaining. Who is going to look out for your right to decent health care insurance. The very same people you're treating like garbage. By all means protect life and garb anyone you see do something like throw a brick threw a window, but otherwise ask yourself why you're acting like the goon enforcers of some despotic regime.

B-I-N-G-Oh Hell No: Judge Rules That Alabama Republicans Acted With Racist Intent to Suppress Voter Turnout

What Liberal Media - Most of President Obama's Accomplishments Go Unreported

What Liberal Media - Most of President Obama's Accomplishments Go Unreported

The teeming crowds of supporters who had cheered candidate Barack Obama’s agenda for “change you can believe in” receded quickly. The 2008 presidential election energized Americans who had never participated in politics before, particularly the young and minorities, and it attracted the interest and hopes of many independents, people who are usually less engaged in the political process. Once elected, the young president held to his word and pursued transformations in American social policy — healthcare reform, new tax breaks, and enhanced aid to college students — that vast majorities of Americans had long told pollsters they favored. Despite the usual travails of the legislative process, exacerbated in 2009 and 2010 by greater political polarization in Congress than at any other point in the post–World War II period, within 15 months Obama had already achieved much of what he set out to do on these issues. Yet Americans generally seemed unimpressed and increasingly disillusioned. The problem was that most of what was accomplished could not be seen: It remained invisible to average citizens.

The public had no trouble noticing the jockeying of special interests that sought favored treatment in legislation — that was plain to see — but the majority of Americans remained unaware of the contents of the president’s signature achievements, and they lacked a basic understanding of how they and their families might be affected by them. The first major piece of legislation that Obama had signed into law, the stimulus bill of February 2009, included a vast array of tax cuts: They totaled $288 billion, 37 percent of the cost of the entire bill. Among them, the Making Work Pay Tax Credit, one of his campaign promises, reduced income taxes for 95 percent of all working Americans. Yet one year after the law went into effect, when pollsters queried the public about whether the Obama administration had raised or lowered taxes for most Americans, only 12 percent answered correctly that taxes had decreased; 53 percent mistakenly thought taxes had stayed the same; and 24 percent even believed they had increased!

Healthcare reform represented Obama’s chief policy goal, and he expended a vast amount of political capital in pursuing it over his first 15 months in office. But in April 2010, just weeks after he signed the healthcare bill that extended coverage to the vast majority of working-age Americans and prohibited insurance companies from denying coverage to people who are ill, 55 percent of the public reported that they would describe their feelings about it as “confused.”

That same legislative package also contained sweeping changes in student aid policy that aimed to help more people attend college and complete degrees. Yet when Americans were asked how much they had heard about these changes, only 26 percent reported “a lot,” while 40 percent said “a little,” and fully 34 percent said “nothing at all.”

All told, the public seemed largely oblivious to the president’s major policy accomplishments.

While many who had voted for Obama grew complacent, grassroots mobilization emerged from another quarter, the insurgent Tea Party movement. Wielding placards at protests on tax day, town hall meetings and other public events, its supporters decried what they termed “government takeovers” of healthcare and student loans. At a gathering in Simpsonville, S.C., in August 2009, one man told Republican Rep. Robert Inglis, “Keep your government hands off my Medicare.” Inglis said later, “I had to politely explain that ‘Actually, sir, your healthcare is being provided by the government,’ but he wasn’t having any of it.”

While as of March 2010 only 13 percent of Americans reported that they considered themselves “part of the Tea Party movement,” nonetheless the frustration that it embodied resonated with growing numbers of Americans: 28 percent considered themselves supporters.

With the content of Obama’s legislative accomplishments appearing so opaque and incomprehensible even as the calls of opponents resonated loud and clear, most Americans registered reactions that were tepid at best, and many grew increasingly hostile. By the fall of 2010, 61 percent of likely voters told pollsters they favored a repeal of healthcare reform.

It was a sharp contrast to the warm reception given to sweeping social welfare laws achieved by earlier presidents. After Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law the Social Security Act of 1935, 68 percent of the public voiced support for its “contributory old age insurance plan … which requires employers and workers to make equal contributions to workers’ pensions” — even though its benefits were not scheduled to begin for six years.

When Congress passed Lyndon Baines Johnson’s plan for Medicare in 1965, strong majorities repeatedly said they approved of it, as high as 82 percent in a December survey that year.

Until Obama’s presidency, perhaps never before had major laws that aimed to improve the lives of vast numbers of ordinary Americans gone so unrecognized and unappreciated by so many.

What explains the public’s reticence, frustration and confusion? Certainly its reactions owe partly to the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression, with more than two years of near 10 percent unemployment. Some of the lackluster response was inevitable, furthermore, given the sheer scope and complexity of the policy tasks Obama took on. And a share of the blame belongs to his administration’s own public relations efforts, which many observers considered underwhelming. Yet while each of these commonly cited factors undeniably played a role, they do not, by themselves, explain Americans’ blasé response to major social policy accomplishments that reflected broadly shared values. Historical comparisons make this evident. The public voiced its high approval for the Social Security Act of 1935, for example, when the nation was still mired in the Great Depression and when twice the proportion of Americans, 20 percent, remained jobless. That legislation was also multifaceted and complex, and it was even more novel for the United States than the 2010 healthcare package, marking the first major involvement of the U.S. federal government in social provision for people besides veterans and their relatives.

The main difference confronted by Obama emanated from the types of policies that he sought to reform, ones that generate particularly formidable obstacles. Any leader who seeks to transform “politics as usual” is bound to confront resistance — challenges emanating from the policies, practices and institutions already in place.

But the nature and difficulty of the task vary depending on the particular goals that reformers select and the historical context in which they pursue them. Roosevelt confronted a political landscape that presented its own challenges — not least, a Supreme Court that served as a major roadblock to his policy ambitions. His administration had to attempt to fashion policies that would circumvent the court’s reach and to build as much as possible on what already existed, such as social policies adopted by some states. But Obama’s policy agenda, in the current political context, requires him to engage in a struggle more akin to that undertaken by Progressive Era reformers, who had to destroy or reconstitute deeply entrenched relationships if they were to achieve change.

He could not follow the path of Roosevelt, finding a way around political obstacles or merely building on top of what existed; rather, he had to find ways to work through them, by either obliterating them or restructuring them.

This is because Obama, given his policy agenda, had steered directly into the looming precipice of the submerged state: existing policies that lay beneath the surface of U.S. market institutions and within the federal tax system. Contrary to opponents’ charges that his agenda involved the encroachment of the federal government into private matters, Obama was actually attempting to restructure a dense thicket of long-established public policies, but ones that are largely invisible to most Americans — and that are extremely resistant to change. Efforts to transform these policies, which have become entrenched fixtures of modern governance, generate a deeply conflictual politics that routinely alienates the public, hindering the chances of success or the sustainability of the reforms.

The “submerged state” includes a conglomeration of federal policies that function by providing incentives, subsidies or payments to private organizations or households to encourage or reimburse them for conducting activities deemed to serve a public purpose. Over the past 30 years, American political discourse has been dominated by a conservative public philosophy, one that espouses the virtues of small government. Its values have been pursued in part through efforts to scale back traditional forms of social provision, meaning visible benefits administered fairly directly by government. In the case of some programs geared to the young or to working-age people, the value of average benefits has withered and coverage has grown more restrictive.

Ironically, however, the more dramatic change over this period has been the flourishing of the policies of the submerged state, which operate through indirect means such as tax breaks to households or payments to private actors who provide services. Since 1980 these policies have proliferated in number, and the average size of their benefits has expanded dramatically.

Most of these ascendant policies function in a way that directly contradicts Americans’ expectations of social welfare policies: They shower their largest benefits on the most affluent Americans. Take the Home Mortgage Interest Deduction (HMID), for example, which is currently the nation’s most expensive social tax break aside from the tax-free status of employer-provided health coverage. Let us assume that a family buys a median-value home and to finance it borrows $230,000 at an interest rate of 6.25 percent for 30 years. The richer the household, the larger the benefit: In the first year, the average family, with an income between $16,751 and $68,000, would owe around $3,619 less in taxes; those in the next income group, with earnings up to $137,300, would reap an extra $5,146; and so forth, on up to the wealthiest 2 percent of families, with incomes over $373,650, who would enjoy a savings of $6,673. Of course, in reality, these differences are likely to be much greater. Low- to moderate-income Americans usually do not have enough deductions to itemize, so they would forgo this benefit and receive instead only the standard deduction. Meanwhile, the most affluent are likely to purchase far more expensive homes; if a family in the top income category opts for a more upscale home and borrows $500,000 for a mortgage, it will reap a benefit of $14,506 from the HMID; if this family purchases a truly exclusive property and borrows $1 million for a mortgage, it will qualify to keep a whopping $29,012!

This pattern of upward redistribution is repeated in numerous other policies of the submerged state: Federal largesse is allocated disproportionately to the nation’s most well-off households. Such policies consume a sizable portion of revenues and leave scarce resources available for programs that genuinely aid low- and middle-income Americans.

Yet despite their growing size, scope and tendency to channel government benefits toward the wealthy, the policies of the submerged state remain largely invisible to ordinary Americans: Indeed, their hallmark is the way they obscure government’s role from the view of the general public, including those who number among their beneficiaries. Even when people stare directly at these policies, many perceive only a freely functioning market system at work. They understand neither what is at stake in reform efforts nor the significance of their success. As a result, the charge leveled by opponents of reforms — that they amount to “government takeovers” — though blatantly inaccurate, makes many Americans at least uncomfortable with policy changes, if not openly hostile toward them.  ***Rest of the article continues at the link.

What with internet access to many government sites and public policy think tanks if the public, especially right-wing conservatives uses the internet at all it is go to sites whose bias is evident in the serial lies that tell about Obama and Democrats. Some minds are simply closed to the truth and new ideas. The example above of the tea nut who wanted government to keep their hands off his Medicare is a good example - Medicare is a government health insurance program, what conservatives derisively call an entitlement program. It is an entitlement because individuals pay for it through their payroll taxes. It is not a government giveaway. It is not giving anyone a free ride.

The Latest Desperate Smear Of Occupy Wall Street Protests: The Nazis Like Them

The American Nazi Party put out a statement on Thursday that was supportive of the Occupy Wall Street protests. Rocky Suhayda, the party's chairman, said, "My heart is right there with these people."

The right-wing blogosphere saw an opportunity to associate the protests with Nazis, and the pile-on began. The Blaze quoted the statement, as did Fox Nation and Gateway Pundit blogger Jim Hoft.

On the Monday edition of Fox News' flagship "straight news" program Special Report, anchor Bret Baier also treated this endorsement as if it were significant:

Interesting fact about Suhayda: During the 2008 presidential campaign, he declared his preference for Barack Obama over John McCain.

In a June 2008 piece, Esquire magazine interviewed Suhayda along with three other white supremacists -- and three of the four preferred Obama. Esquire also interviewed a black nationalist who chose McCain.

Similarly, an Al Qaeda affiliate expressed its hope that George W. Bush would win re-election in 2004, and an Al Qaeda website offered its support for McCain in 2008.

So, does this mean that Obama is just like the Nazis, or that Bush shares Al Qaeda's goals, or that McCain is a black nationalist?

Of course not. These are all ridiculous associations to make. Fringe groups make provocative comments like this all the time, often in the interest of attracting publicity.

The right-wing media's promotion of Suhayda's statement reveals an agenda that is dead-set on delegitimizing the message of the protests, to the extent that they're willing to employ comically flimsy logic in an attempt to do so.

Reminder: If a Nazi says something nice about you, that doesn't make you a Nazi.

Five Myths About The Economy That Conservatives Keep Repeating

Five Myths About The Economy That Conservatives Keep Repeating

The Top Five

Here are five “conventional wisdom” doses of economic nonsense that we have been fed:

1. Business does everything better than government ?

Corporate conservatives argue that businesses and their one-dollar-one-vote system of decision-making is better and more efficient than We, the People's government and its one-person-one-vote system. They argue that constant competition, placing companies under constant fear of going under and people under constant fear of job-loss, focuses the mind like a pending execution. They say it leads them to do only what they should be doing and no more, in the best possible way, always looking for the best and most “efficient” ways, forcing innovation to occur.

But as we have seen, what actually happens in this kind of dehumanized “Force You” system (as in “F.U.”) is that businesses are forced to cut every corner, cheapen every product, cut out every service, lay people off, cut people’s wages while adding hours, gut benefits … and probably go under anyway because when every business does the same 99 percent of us can’t afford to buy or do things anymore.

The effect on people (human beings – remember them?) is worse. Stress-induced illness is rampant in our fear-based society. People do not get sufficient sleep, skip vacations, work long hours, spend less time with their families, spend very little time in nature, and the rest of the things that make us human.

This idea that people are best when operating under constant fear is similar to the conservative mantra that everyone should carry a gun because then you have “a polite society.” Perhaps constant fear and stress keeps people on their toes and makes them “behave” but in the long run it’s just no way to live.

Another “feature” of this top-down, one-dollar-one-vote, “market” system that the corporate conservatives advocate is that only those at the top levels of the corporate/financial ladder make the decisions for, and receive the benefits of, society. This is great if – and only if – you are in that 1 percent. But one-person-one-vote, democratic government decision-making means all of us have an equal say with equal access and equal opportunity, and society operates for the benefit of all of us.

2. Rich people are “job creators.”?

This is the old “trickle-down” idea -- that if you give enough money to the already-rich eventually some of that money will trickle down to the rest of us. This is also called the “getting peed on” theory of economics.

The basis of this thinking comes from the theories of Ayn Rand, who argued that society consists of “producers” and “parasites.” Rand’s fundamentally anti-democratic ideology says that democracy is a form of “collectivism” in which people who don’t want to work and produce use their numbers to steal from a gifted few who are the “producers” of goods and services. Rand’s followers claim that wealthy people are rich because they “produce.” The rest of us are “parasites” who “take money” from the productive rich, by taxing them. This revenue is “redistributed” to the parasites to pay for our “entitlements.”

They say that if wealthy people have more money they will use that money to start businesses and hire people. But anyone with a real business will tell you that people coming in the door and buying things is what creates jobs. In a real economy, people wanting to buy things – demand – is what causes businesses to form and people to be hired.

History – and a quick look around us today – shows that when all the money goes to a few at the top demand from the rest of us dries up and everything breaks down.  Taxing the people at the top and reinvesting the money into the democratic society is fundamental to keeping things going.

3. Government and taxes take money out of the economy?

Yes, they actually say that government and taxes “take money out of the economy.” They argue that the money government collects is a) pocketed by politicians; or b) stuffed under a giant mattress; or c) is just wasted.

In reality the taxes that government collects are invested in the “public structures” that create the prosperity and lifestyle we enjoy – or at least did before taxes were cut. Tax revenue builds the infrastructure of transportation, courts, schools, universities, research facilities and other institutions that enable our businesses to grow and prosper and the consumer protection, safety inspection, water and sewer, health, parks and arts that help us live and enjoy our lives.

But there is a powerful reason for people to feel the government does seem to be providing value for the money it costs us: so much of the federal budget goes to military and military-related spending. Spending on wars, the "Defense" department (military), intelligence, nuclear weapons, veterans, and related budget items (including interest on money borrowed for past military spending) is a significant portion of the budget, and people instinctively feel that the country is not getting back services that match what they are putting in.

High top tax rates also reduce the incentive to be greedy and destructive, which can overcome many of us and make us do things we shouldn’t. Cutting top tax rates in the '80s forced a change in business models away from long-term planning and building wealth by building sustainable businesses over decades. Instead, since you could take home a fortune overnight, it made more sense to go for the get-rich-quick, sell-the-farm-style schemes so prevalent today.

4. Regulations Kill Jobs?

Corporate conservatives say that “government just gets in the way” and costs money, which leaves less room for hiring. This is a corollary to the “business knows best” argument and to the idea that society consists of a few “producers” who are inherently superior to the masses of people. The thinking is that We, the People don’t know what we are doing, and businesses with their top-down structure will do the right thing more efficiently.

Those engaged in a business do know the business better than outsiders.  But regulations that protect the public, employees and the environment govern how the actions of businesses affect the rest of us.  A business wants to make a profit, and will only care how regulations affect that goal.  It makes sense for government to set up regulations because the rest of us are concerned about the larger world of the rest of us, and therefore understand more clearly how the actions of a business will affect the rest of us.

In may cases regulations keep businesses from doing things that kill jobs – and people.

5. “Protectionism” hurts the economy.

Corporate conservatives argue that “free trade” is always good under all circumstances. They say we get lower prices and our businesses are able to reach more customers. Of course trade can be a wonderful thing, increasing the standard of living on both sides of the trade border.

But the trade deals of recent decades have not been free or fair, and can’t really even be called “trade.” What has happened is countries sell to us but do not buy equally from us, causing huge trade deficits that have drained our economy and our jobs and our wages. Instead of increasing prosperity they have been used to increase exploitation of working people and the environment for the benefit of a wealthy few.

Our prosperity is the fruit of our democracy. 

Conservatives say that it is good that businesses in countries like China are more competitive because they don’t have a lot of regulations to comply with. Countries where the people have little say in things don’t have to spend the money to pay minimum wages, keep the environment clean, keep workers safe and keep products up to standard and they don’t have to worry about lawsuits. They are more “efficient.” So they can charge less.

Conservatives who argue that we should have less regulation, lower wages, fewer benefits, fewer consumer, worker and environmental protections are really arguing that we should abandon democracy. By opening our borders to goods made where people do not have a say we made democracy a competitive disadvantage.

Fed Up With the Nonsense

So as we see all around us today, the economic conventional wisdom nonsense that we were force-fed for decades didn’t work, messed things up, and people finally got fed so much if it that they are fed up. The #occupy crowd got fed up and showed up. They sleep in the park and on sidewalks, marched, and took the batons and pepper spray that seem to always come at us when we protest. They persisted, and awakened the rest of us. Now it has spread to cities across the country.

They shook loose from the shadow-fog of propaganda that shrouds us from morning to night, from radio to TV to newspaper. They didn’t prepare a media strategy with a savvy focus-group-tested message targeting key demographics. They didn’t care how they looked or how they would be seen. They didn’t care what the media would say. They certainly didn’t care what Wall Street would do. They saw clearly where the problem is, and decided to just go ahead and do something.

They said that what is going on is wrong, it is bad, it is hurting people, and that they were not going to put up with that for one more minute. They said it is time to be citizens not consumers.  They are choosing to have some meaning in their lives beyond just being worker bees helping perpetuate a destructive system.

So they decided to “occupy Wall Street” in the name of the 99 percent of us who have been losing out in this economy, and the honesty and clarity of that has caught on.

    “No one is confused about the message. Wall Street got bailed out; Main Street was abandoned. The top 1% rigs the rules and pockets the rewards. And 99% get sent the bill for the party they weren't even invited to.” – Robert Borosage

    Poets, priests and politicians
    Have words to thank for their positions
    Words that scream for your submission
    And no-one's jamming their transmission
    And when their eloquence escapes you
    Their logic ties you up and rapes you

    -“De Do Do Do De Da Da Da,” The Police

When is the last time you heard someone in big corporate media challenge any of these conservative myths. The reason we hear so much news about scandals and missing persons ( stories worthy of coverage, but not the over done exploitative coverage we get) is because those stories take up lots of air time and are easy to cover. The corporate media also tend to act like the most popular kids in school, they don't want to do or say anything that goes against the conventional wisdom because it would put a dent in their popularity.

Bush Has learned Nothing From His Failures. Bush Remains The Typical Arrogant Conservative

Bush Has learned Nothing From His Failures. Bush Remains The Typical Arrogant Conservative

President Bush sat down with USA Today to discuss the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and his role in shaping U.S. policy in their aftermath. During the interview, Bush thought he’d take the opportunity to pat himself on the back for Osama bin Laden’s death:

    Bush said the events that led to the death of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in May began during his administration.

    “The work that was done by intelligence communities during my presidency was part of putting together the puzzle that enabled us to see the full picture of how bin Laden was communicating and eventually where he was hiding,” he said. “It began the day after 9/11.”

The reality, of course, is that Bush’s attempts to capture or kill bin Laden were huge failures. While it’s been well documented that the Bush administration missed an opportunity to get bin Laden in Tora Bora in 2001, Bush himself subsequently stated publicly that he wasn’t spending much time thinking about getting him. “I truly am not that concerned about him. I am deeply concerned about Iraq,” Bush said in 2002, “I really just don’t spend that much time on him, to be honest with you.” Bush told reporters in 2006 that hunting the al Qaeda leader was “not a top priority use of American resources.”

And in 2005, Bush shut down the CIA’s unit dedicated to finding bin Laden in order to shift resources to Iraq. “The Central Intelligence Agency has closed a unit that for a decade had the mission of hunting Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants,” the New York Times reported in 2006, adding that resources “had been redirected from the hunt for Mr. bin Laden to the search for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed last month in Iraq.” When the right wing rushed to give Bush credit after bin Laden’s death in May, ThinkProgress produced this short video highlighting Bush’s failures:

Soon after he took office, President Obama steered the U.S. on a course to end the war in Iraq and put resources back into finding bin Laden. “Shortly after I got into office,” Obama said in an interview after bin Laden’s death, “I brought [then-CIA director] Leon Panetta privately into the Oval Office and I said to him, ‘We need to redouble our efforts in hunting bin Laden down. And I want us to start putting more resources, more focus, and more urgency into that mission.’”

Republican Wuss of the Week - Why is House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) Afraid of His Constituents

Republican Wuss of the Week - Why is House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) Afraid of His Constituents

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI), the author of the House GOP plan to phase out Medicare, does not like it when constituents publicly challenge him. In fact, people who disagree with Ryan have a habit of getting arrested for it. A few weeks ago, several of Ryan’s unemployed constituents staged a peaceful sit-in at his Kenosha, Wisconsin office to protest his unpopular decision not to hold any free public town halls during the August recess. These constituents didn’t think they should have to pay to ask their elected representative a question. Instead of meeting with them, Ryan’s staff called the police.

So it should come as no surprise that this week, three people who paid to see Ryan speak were arrested and charged with trespassing for protesting the event. One constituent, a 71-year-old retired plumber from Kenosha, Wisconsin, was handcuffed and pushed to the ground by security:

    Video footage taken by an attendee at the event shows that one of them, Tom Nielsen, received particularly harsh treatment — he was pushed to the ground and handcuffed. Nielsen received an additional charge of resisting arrest.

    Ryan was speaking Tuesday afternoon at the Whitnall Park Rotary Club. Protesters gathered both outside his event and inside, standing up and disrupting the congressman’s remarks.

    According to Oak Creek Patch, as many as a dozen protesters were escorted out of the event. Another dozen or so left willingly.

Ryan seemed supremely undisturbed that a senior citizen worried about receiving the Medicare he’s paid into his whole life was treated so brutally. Indeed, Ryan made light of the arrest and quipped to the audience, “I hope he’s taking his blood pressure medication.”

Watch it, courtesy of Wisconsin Jobs Now:

Another woman was shown the door when she challenged Ryan’s claim that the jobs crisis is directly related to the debt crisis. “Our debt is out of control because of the tax cuts you’re giving,” she said. “Our unemployment in 2003 was 6.2% before the tax cuts went through. Now our unemployment rate is 9.1%. What are you doing to create jobs, Congressman?” Another woman was escorted out when she stood up while Ryan was speaking and said, “You won’t talk to us. How can we give our opinions when you refuse to talk to us?”

Ryan has consistently faced angry constituents at his events since his Medicare-killing budget became a top GOP priority. Tired of being publicly embarrassed by constituents who voice their disagreement and say his policies are hurting them, Ryan has resorted to increasingly harsh responses to deal with people who have the audacity to speak up at his events.

I do have a question for the local police. I'm sure you're good folks but why are you acting as strong-arm bullies for this wussball Congress critter. That really is not your job. If one of them tries to physically attack Ryan that is another story. This people are just trying to get straight answers.

Is It True That Obama Went on a Big Spending Spree

Don't believe the Obama big spender hype - The GOP just can't handle the truth: Tax cuts, war and the financial crisis created our huge deficits

How many outright errors of fact can you spot in the following paragraph from an op-ed by Mitt Romney published this Monday?

[Barack Obama's] approach has been to engage in one of the biggest peacetime spending binges in American history. With its failed stimulus package, its grandiose new social programs, its fervor for more taxes and government regulations, and its hostility toward business, the administration has made the debt problem worse, hindered economic recovery and needlessly cost American workers countless jobs.

Let's see. We're at war in Afghanistan, so "peacetime" is dubious. Obama has cut taxes -- income taxes, payroll taxes, taxes for small businesses. Private sector economic forecasters say the stimulus increased GDP growth and kept the unemployment rate from rising higher. We could even range into the subjective, and argue that from the left side of the political aisle, Obama has been anything but hostile to business and hasn't done nearly enough to regulate the financial sector. And we could note, just for fun, that Obama's "grandiose" social program is modeled explicitly after the healthcare reform enacted by none other than Mitt Romney in Massachusetts. (And this guy, most political analysts think, poses the biggest threat to Obama's reelection!)

But nothing is more ridiculous than the notion that Obama is a "binge" spender. Paul Krugman rightfully calls this scurrilous accusation a "zombie lie." No matter how many times you kill it, whether by decapitation, a spike through the heart or immolation -- it just keeps coming back. It's enough to make you despair -- particularly when you consider how many more times we're going to hear this nonsense from Romney and the rest of the Republican presidential candidates from now until the last precinct closes on Election Day 2012.

But as long as the undead keep coming, we have no choice but to fight hellspawn with our own holy fire. So let's review the facts.

The current budget deficit is predominantly an outgrowth of the Bush tax cuts, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Medicare Part D and the financial crisis.

Here's the first thing to understand. Before Obama took office, before he was able to spend a single dime as president, the Congressional Budget Office predicted that the 2009 deficit would be $1 trillion dollars. According to an analysis published by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in June 2010, about half of that total -- $500 billion -- can be attributed to the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Another $400 billion was a direct result of the "changed economic outlook" -- the collapse of "tax revenues and swelling outlays for unemployment insurance, food stamps and other safety-net programs."

In the summer of 2009, the New York Times's David Leonhardt (recently awarded a Pulitzer prize for his economic coverage) conducted an indispensable analysis of the budget deficit for 2009. (By that point it was projected to hit $1.2 trillion; ultimately it reached $1.4 trillion -- in part because of stimulus spending and in part because the economy continued to get worse.) Leonhardt observed that since 2000, the year that Bill Clinton bequeathed George Bush with an $800 billion surplus, there had been a negative $2 trillion swing in the health of the government's finances. Crunching the numbers from a decade's worth of CBO reports, Leonhardt discovered:

The 2001 and 2007-2009 recessions accounted for 37 percent of the swing -- again, because of decreased tax revenue and automatically higher spending on social welfare.
Legislation signed by George Bush accounted for another 33 percent -- the tax cuts and Medicare Part D.

"Mr. Obama's main contribution to the deficit is his extension of several Bush policies, like the Iraq war and tax cuts for households making less than $250,000. Such policies -- together with the Wall Street bailout, which was signed by Mr. Bush and supported by Mr. Obama -- account for 20 percent of the swing."

"About 7 percent comes from the stimulus bill that Mr. Obama signed in February. And only 3 percent comes from Mr. Obama's agenda on health care, education, energy and other areas."

The CBPP includes a neat little chart in its analysis that brings home the long-term consequences of the decisions made by Bush and Obama. Yes, the stimulus added to the budget deficit in the short term, but over the next 10 years, its contribution to the ongoing deficit -- along with TARP and the Fannie-Freddie rescue -- is minimal. The real drivers of the deficit will continue to be the Bush tax cuts and the wars -- if both continue. The tax cuts alone will account for some $7 trillion of the additional national debt over the next 10 years. And the interest payments on the debt accrued simply to pay for the automatic safety-net response to the Great Recession will also continue making a meaningful impact for years to come, long after a full recovery.

Fiscal Chart - see above.

Obama, of course, bears some responsibility for continuing the Bush tax cuts and the Bush wars -- but so do nearly every Republican legislator, and it's very difficult to imagine that Mitt Romney as president would have done anything differently. In fact, it's quite possible that the deficit would have gotten worse under Romney, because if he had decided to inject no stimulus at all into the economy, the downturn would likely have been worse, tax revenue would have declined even further, and social welfare spending would be even greater. And if any Republican president had attempted to slash spending in accordance with current party rhetoric, we'd be staring directly into the depths of Great Depression 2.0.

Also crucial to note: Obama's major new initiatives were either designed to be short term, such as the stimulus, or revenue neutral, such as healthcare reform. That's not something you can say about Bush's budget busters.

The budget deficits under Obama are big, there's no doubt about that. But the primary drivers of those deficits are a combination of decisions made by George W. Bush and the worst economic crisis in the United States in 80 years.

Why do conservatives keep spreading the lie that President Obama is a big spender? To distract from the fact they drove the economy off a cliff. Conservatives know they caused the recession by not keeping an eye on Wall St and by not paying for two wars. All the while insisting that we keep tax cuts for the richest who need them the least.

Republican Cult Worship - Rupert Murdoch Set To Air 9/11 Documentary Glorifying Bush; Producer Says He’s Not Interested In ‘Facts’

Republican Cult Worship - Rupert Murdoch Set To Air 9/11 Documentary Glorifying Bush; Producer Says He’s Not Interested In ‘Facts’

After spending over a decade promoting President Bush, the PATRIOT Act, and the Iraq War, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation appears to be up to the same tricks, this time with an hour-long promotional video about Bush’s leadership during the 9/11 attacks. Although News Corp. is perhaps best known for its Bush cheerleading through its Fox News subsidiary, the Bush documentary is airing on another News Corp. company with a better brand image, National Geographic.

The documentary has not aired yet, but is scheduled to come out a few days before the 10-year anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Early reviews of the program, however, paint Bush as a hero who discarded politics and his right-wing agenda once the planes hit the towers. The film also depicts Bush as a leader bent on capturing Osama bin Laden, no matter what:

“It’s not one of those moments where you weigh the consequences or think about the politics,” [Bush] adds. ”You decide. And I made the decisions as best I could in the fog of war. I was determined. Determined to protect the country. And I was determined to find out who did it and go get them.”

In reality, within hours of the 9/11 plane hijackings, Bush’s Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld began drawing up plans to launch a war in Iraq “even though there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks.” Indeed, Bush aides quickly went to work undercutting the proposed commission to study the events leading up the 9/11, and despite the growing evidence linking the terrorist act with Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda group, Bush never made bin Laden a priority. By January 2002, Dick Cheney told the press that bin Laden “isn’t that big a threat.” The next month, Bush said bin Laden was “not the issue.”

Will producer Peter Schnall critically, and accurately, explain to the public Bush’s actions during and after the horrific 9/11 terrorist attacks? In a recent interview about the program, Schnall said he tried not to push “it too far” with the former president, and that he was “less interested in facts than how” Bush “was feeling”:

“He would only take it to so far,” Schnall tells Zap2it. “If I had pushed it too far, he might have shut down a bit more, and my goal was to get him to talk about those four or five days. I was less interested in facts than how he was feeling.”

News Corp. has a long and complicated relationship with the Bush administration. In addition to promoting the Bush political agenda for two terms on Fox News, former Bush aides have flocked to the corporation as employees (Bush’s top strategist and spokeswoman, Karl Rove and Dana Perino, are among the many Bush admin alumni seen every day on Fox News). Bush’s assistant attorney general Viet Dinh, the “chief architect” of the PATRIOT Act, is an influential board member of News Corp. now overseeing the investigation of the hacking scandal now embroiling the company.

But if there’s any doubt that News Corp. isn’t serious about its latest attempt at Bush hagiography, take a look at the publicity effort around the documentary. On Tuesday, Matt Dornic promoted a special viewing of the documentary on the FishbowlDC website. Dornic is a staffer for Quinn Gillespie, News Corp.’s lobbying firm and public relations agency in Washington, DC

Also a fact that Bin Laden, the man responsible for 9-11 was in Afghanistan, where Bush Squandered Victory to make Saddam a priority. Bush also had a chance to get Bin laden at Tora Bora but had already shifted many military sources away from capturing him. President Obama reconsitutted the CIA's Bin laden unit which eventually lead to Bin laden's death.

Rupert Murdoch's Puppet Bill O'Reilly Keeps Lying About Taxes

Rupert Murdoch's Puppet Bill O'Reilly Keeps Lying About Taxes

Fox host Bill O'Reilly laughs off any calls for increasing government spending to help create jobs. Last week he derided Paul Krugman for

demanding more stimulus spending. And this guy teaches economics at Princeton University? Unbelievable.

People like Bill O'Reilly don't pay any mind to the fancy pants Nobel Prize committee that gave Krugman one of their liberal awards. Why should he? He knows how the economy really works, as he explained last night (8/8/11):

Raising income taxes is not the way out of this. In 2001 and again in 2003, President Bush cut individual tax rates. And what happened? Well, from 2004 until 2008, tax revenue increased from about $800 billion to almost $1.2 trillion. That blows away the liberal argument that tax cuts starve the government of revenue. They don't.

This has been, at times, a talking point among conservatives. But you don't really get a sense of tax revenue without comparing it to something-- as FactCheck.org noted in a piece in 2007 (when John McCain was saying much the same about the Bush tax cuts), revenues tend to increase every year as the economy grows.

A more useful measure would be how tax revenue looks relative to the size of the economy. As the Economic Policy Institute put it in a recent report (6/1/11) on the 10-year anniversary of the Bush cuts:

• Federal tax revenue fell from 20.6 percent of GDP in FY2000 (the last year of the 1991-2000 expansion and reflective of
Clinton-era tax rates) to 18.5 percent of GDP in FY2007 (the last year of the Bush economic expansion and reflective of
Bush-era tax rates).

• From 2001 through 2010, the cuts added $2.6 trillion to the public debt, nearly 50 percent of the total debt accrued
during this period.

• The decade of the Bush tax cuts had, on average, lower revenue levels as a share of the economy than any previous
decade since the 1950s.

That would be (part of) the "liberal argument" against the Bush tax cuts--and it doesn't appear to be "blown away" by O'Reilly's too-good-for-Princeton economic analysis.


Peter Hart is the activism director at FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting).

Where is O'Reilly's degree in economics or his Nobel prize? O'Liely loves a good spin. That way he can leave out the fact that taxes are the lowest they have been since 1950. O'Liely can leave out that the richest 1% of Americans get 24% of its wealth - anyone want to make the case that 1% does 24% of the work that produces our Gross National Product. You have to go back to 1922 to find a time is history where wealth was so obscenely rewarded and work was punished. It is no wonder that O'Liely likes the way things are - between TV show and radio show he pulls in a reported $3 million a year. he plays the average guy on TV, he is not the average guy in real life. If you're a clerk, a mechanic, a teacher or a nurse O'Liely is trying to convince you that most of the nation's wealth should go to the richest and laziest.

Is Big Government Spending Causing The Deficit

Radical conservatives just can't handle the truth: Tax cuts, war and the financial crisis created our huge deficits

How many outright errors of fact can you spot in the following paragraph from an op-ed by Mitt Romney published this Monday?

[Barack Obama's] approach has been to engage in one of the biggest peacetime spending binges in American history. With its failed stimulus package, its grandiose new social programs, its fervor for more taxes and government regulations, and its hostility toward business, the administration has made the debt problem worse, hindered economic recovery and needlessly cost American workers countless jobs.

Let's see. We're at war in Afghanistan, so "peacetime" is dubious. Obama has cut taxes -- income taxes, payroll taxes, taxes for small businesses. Private sector economic forecasters say the stimulus increased GDP growth and kept the unemployment rate from rising higher. We could even range into the subjective, and argue that from the left side of the political aisle, Obama has been anything but hostile to business and hasn't done nearly enough to regulate the financial sector. And we could note, just for fun, that Obama's "grandiose" social program is modeled explicitly after the healthcare reform enacted by none other than Mitt Romney in Massachusetts. (And this guy, most political analysts think, poses the biggest threat to Obama's reelection!)

But nothing is more ridiculous than the notion that Obama is a "binge" spender. Paul Krugman rightfully calls this scurrilous accusation a "zombie lie." No matter how many times you kill it, whether by decapitation, a spike through the heart or immolation -- it just keeps coming back. It's enough to make you despair -- particularly when you consider how many more times we're going to hear this nonsense from Romney and the rest of the Republican presidential candidates from now until the last precinct closes on Election Day 2012.

But as long as the undead keep coming, we have no choice but to fight hellspawn with our own holy fire. So let's review the facts.

The current budget deficit is predominantly an outgrowth of the Bush tax cuts, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Medicare Part D and the financial crisis.

Here's the first thing to understand. Before Obama took office, before he was able to spend a single dime as president, the Congressional Budget Office predicted that the 2009 deficit would be $1 trillion dollars. According to an analysis published by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in June 2010, about half of that total -- $500 billion -- can be attributed to the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Another $400 billion was a direct result of the "changed economic outlook" -- the collapse of "tax revenues and swelling outlays for unemployment insurance, food stamps and other safety-net programs."

In the summer of 2009, the New York Times's David Leonhardt (recently awarded a Pulitzer prize for his economic coverage) conducted an indispensable analysis of the budget deficit for 2009. (By that point it was projected to hit $1.2 trillion; ultimately it reached $1.4 trillion -- in part because of stimulus spending and in part because the economy continued to get worse.) Leonhardt observed that since 2000, the year that Bill Clinton bequeathed George Bush with an $800 billion surplus, there had been a negative $2 trillion swing in the health of the government's finances. Crunching the numbers from a decade's worth of CBO reports, Leonhardt discovered:

The 2001 and 2007-2009 recessions accounted for 37 percent of the swing -- again, because of decreased tax revenue and automatically higher spending on social welfare. Legislation signed by George Bush accounted for another 33 percent -- the tax cuts and Medicare Part D.

"Mr. Obama's main contribution to the deficit is his extension of several Bush policies, like the Iraq war and tax cuts for households making less than $250,000. Such policies -- together with the Wall Street bailout, which was signed by Mr. Bush and supported by Mr. Obama -- account for 20 percent of the swing."

"About 7 percent comes from the stimulus bill that Mr. Obama signed in February. And only 3 percent comes from Mr. Obama's agenda on health care, education, energy and other areas."

The CBPP includes a neat little chart in its analysis that brings home the long-term consequences of the decisions made by Bush and Obama. Yes, the stimulus added to the budget deficit in the short term, but over the next 10 years, its contribution to the ongoing deficit -- along with TARP and the Fannie-Freddie rescue -- is minimal. The real drivers of the deficit will continue to be the Bush tax cuts and the wars -- if both continue. The tax cuts alone will account for some $7 trillion of the additional national debt over the next 10 years. And the interest payments on the debt accrued simply to pay for the automatic safety-net response to the Great Recession will also continue making a meaningful impact for years to come, long after a full recovery.

Fiscal Chart_ see above

Obama, of course, bears some responsibility for continuing the Bush tax cuts and the Bush wars -- but so do nearly every Republican legislator, and it's very difficult to imagine that Mitt Romney as president would have done anything differently. In fact, it's quite possible that the deficit would have gotten worse under Romney, because if he had decided to inject no stimulus at all into the economy, the downturn would likely have been worse, tax revenue would have declined even further, and social welfare spending would be even greater. And if any Republican president had attempted to slash spending in accordance with current party rhetoric, we'd be staring directly into the depths of Great Depression 2.0.

Also crucial to note: Obama's major new initiatives were either designed to be short term, such as the stimulus, or revenue neutral, such as healthcare reform. That's not something you can say about Bush's budget busters.

The budget deficits under Obama are big, there's no doubt about that. But the primary drivers of those deficits are a combination of decisions made by George W. Bush and the worst economic crisis in the United States in 80 years.

If we take away the wars Republicans who controlled Congress refused to pay for, the Medicare drug benefit Republicans passed but refused to pay for, two Wall St bail-out packages Republicans voted for and tax cuts for millionaires, plus the crashed economy Republican left for the next guy to handle - Obama has spent less than Bush. We have a revenue crisis not a spending crisis, and Republicans refuse once again to pay for the bills they put on the national credit card.