After the piss-poor attempt at fact-checking the AP did last time around, it’s nice to see that they actually are capable of checking facts once in a while.
Anyone who watched the RNCC last night probably noticed that it was absolutely chock-full of falsehoods that ranged from the “well that’s not exactly fair…” to “wow, that’s absolutely the opposite of reality.” The Associated Press layeth the smacketh down. I’ll just pull out my favorites:
PALIN: “The Democratic nominee for president supports plans to raise income taxes, raise payroll taxes, raise investment income taxes, raise the death tax, raise business taxes, and increase the tax burden on the American people by hundreds of billions of dollars.”
THE FACTS: The Tax Policy Center, a think tank run jointly by the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, concluded that Obama’s plan would increase after-tax income for middle-income taxpayers by about 5 percent by 2012, or nearly $2,200 annually. McCain’s plan, which cuts taxes across all income levels, would raise after tax-income for middle-income taxpayers by 3 percent, the center concluded.
In complete defiance of the facts, the right has been sprinting along with the “Obama wants to raise your taxes” line, so it’s nice that the media is finally getting its act together. There is absolutely, irrefutably, no way to claim that Obama would raise taxes on the American people. I’m not talking spin or perspective or context, I’m talking pure facts. For 95% of the American citizenry, an Obama presidency would mean lower taxes. End of story.
FORMER ARKANSAS GOV. MIKE HUCKABEE: Palin “got more votes running for mayor of Wasilla, Alaska than Joe Biden got running for president of the United States.”
THE FACTS: A whopper. Palin got 616 votes in the 1996 mayor’s election, and got 909 in her 1999 re-election race, for a total of 1,525. Biden dropped out of the race after the Iowa caucuses, but he still got 76,165 votes in 23 states and the District of Columbia where he was on the ballot during the 2008 presidential primaries.
This is the kinda stuff that passes for a convention speech in Republican Land. Whenever you feel like making a point, just use your ass for a bibliography and say whatever you want. By the way, 616 votes for mayor? I’m pretty sure there are high schools out there where the student body president got more than 616 votes.
I like how you criticize an article when it is biased towards McCain but praise it when it is biased toward Obama.
Compare the two, however. Honestly, read them and tell me that, from a journalism standpoint, they are equal.
The “fact check” article on Obama doesn’t refute anything, but rather spins what he says. When Obama said McCain voted with Bush 90% of the time, he was correct, and the AP cited the ONLY year that was under 90%, 2005, as somehow proving Obama wrong. That was how they “fact-checked” the DNCC.
Huckabee said Palin got more votes than Biden, which is irrefutably incorrect. Palin claimed she was against the “Bridge to Nowhere”, when her record clearly shows she supported it. They said Obama will raise taxes on families, when not a single study supports that claim.
Do you see the difference? They had to “add context” to Obama’s claims and “elaborate” on them, while at the RNCC they corrected statements that were absolutely false. Not even close to the same.
For 95% of the American citizenry, an Obama presidency would mean lower taxes. End of story.
That’s not the end of the story. What matters is whether people have jobs, and how well they’re living compared to how hard they’re working.
Both of those values are threatened any time the government attempts to raise revenue by hiking taxes, and it doesn’t matter whether the taxes are imposed on the poor or the rich. Think about it: the whole pie gets smaller every time you take one worker out of the private sector and put him to work for government. How can it not?
Oh right, I forgot, it’s a bad idea to lower taxes on the middle class. Lowering taxes for rich people: good idea, though.
Face it, the conservative policy of “trickle down” economics Has Not Worked. Economic boom during the so-called “tax and spend” Clinton years, massive economic crash during Bush’s “tax cuts on corporations and the wealthy”. Can’t argue with results.
Oh right, I forgot, it’s a bad idea to lower taxes on the middle class.
Well, that depends. If you’re an economically ignorant liberal populist and you want votes, it might be a very good political idea. Especially if you plan to blame the failure of your policy on someone else’s constituency.
However, if you had the reasoning capacity to understand that what the wealthy do disproportionately with their marginal income creates the most prosperity for all income levels (ever tried to get a job from a poor person?), then you would understand that raising taxes always comes at the expense of the middle class, no matter whose rates go up.