Media Deception

I had a conversation this weekend with my dad that disappointed me.  I wasn't so much disappointed in my dad as the extent to which the liberal media has been able to deceive people.  My dad is fairly conservative politically and has almost always voted Republican.  However, even he has fallen prey to the left's propaganda through the so-called "mainstream media".

My parents came to visit our family for the weekend and while the kids were sleeping my dad and I were discussing life.  The conversation turned to history and politics and I mentioned that I thought history was such an important part of politics because so few people understand the lessons of history and we are constantly repeating our past mistakes.  That prompted my dad to make a point that he had heard recently from a radio host (I don't know who).  He said that we have learned from history that "tax cuts for the rich" don't work and neither does massive government spending, so we have to find something else to help the economy.  I found that to be an interesting and disturbing comment and decided to dig a little deeper.  I asked him where in history we have seen that tax cuts don't work and he said "the Bush tax cuts".  I wanted to give him a history lesson and an economic lesson right there, but I remembered this was just a casual conversation so I just gave him a brief rebuttal.  However, I decided that I would use this platform to give a little deeper explanation of what was wrong with this comment.

This is an example of a two related lies that have been repeated over and over by the left to the point that most (or at least way too many) people think it is true.  It is also a case where Republicans have done a pathetic job of challenging and refuting this lie.  The first lie is that the Bush tax cuts were for the rich.  The rich did get a tax cut, but so did every other tax paying American.  This point was greatly illustrated by the recent "fiscal cliff" debate where the Bush tax cuts were set to expire.  Even though they have been heralded as just for the rich, somehow it was everyone's taxes who were set to go up with the expiration.  It just happened that since the tax cut was a rate cut, the rich who pay more also got a bigger cut when the same percentage was applied to the amount they pay.  If you apply this same logic, then the rich are hurt more by tax increases, but the left still insists they aren't paying their "fair share".  As usual, the arguments of the left have no logical basis.

The second lie that has been driven home over and over by President Obama through his Saul Alinksy like tactics, is that the tax cuts caused the 2008 recession.  Remember that I said that the arguments of the left rarely are based on logic.  In this case, we refer to this as a logical fallacy, which is the assumption that because one event proceeds another that the first caused the second.  In other words, because the Bush tax cut proceeded the recession it caused the recession.  In an economic vacuum this might make sense.  However, we have to put this into the whole context of history.  First of all, we have seen the effects of previous tax cuts by both Kennedy and Reagan that dramatically improved the economy.  Second, the Bush tax cuts has actually been extremely beneficial to the economy until late 2007.

Many people forget that Bush actually inherited a recession from Clinton.  The internet bubble that drove the great expansion in the late nineties burst in 2000 and led to a small recession that carried over into the Bush administration.  Instead of spending his entire term blaming his predecessor, Bush passed a tax cut to turn the economy around.  On top of that, the September 11 terrorist attacks provided another big blow to the economy.  However, the tax cuts were so effective that, by the end of Bush's first term, we were experiencing near historic low unemployment rates.  So did these same tax cuts somehow cause the recession?  NO!  Just as a bubble caused the 2001 recession, another more devastating bubble caused the 2008 recession.  This was the housing bubble that had been growing for more than 25 years and accelerated by different law changes around the turn of the century (largely under Clinton).  Even though the tax cuts proceeded the recession there was very little relationship between the two.

I wanted to talk about this, because I am so sick of hearing these lies.  However, I think this also greatly illustrates how ineffective the Republican party has been at refuting these lies even among their base.  Republicans need to be just as persistent in attacking these lies as the Democrats and their media are in spreading them.  If Romney had learned this lesson, he likely would be President today.