There are three basic Republican tax/budget lies:
1. “Taxes are very high.” They are, of course, the lowest among major industrial nations. This is achieved even while wasting huge sums on military adventures partly by failing to provide healthcare and partly by running deficits.
2. “Government is riddled with waste, fraud, and abuse.” There’s a grain of truth in this lie. Privatization of services, especially in military contracting, has created opportunities for corruption by making congressional oversight not merely optional, but impossible.
3. “Government just screws things up.” I’m fairly critical of government operations, but for exactly the opposite reason that Republicans are. Government workers are so intimidated by business control of the regulatory process and by the Republicans using government as its whipping boy that they don’t enforce the law and more lower level workers are in on “revolving door” corruption, in which government workers use their jobs to get industry jobs. Regulations are written by big business, sometimes to keep small business out, and sometimes to protect them from lawsuits.
Anyway, reality always gets the last vote, and in Minnesota, the vote is that the Legislature has totally screwed up education funding. CTJ writes (article includes links):
Minnesota lawmakers balanced the state’s budget earlier this year (after an historic government shutdown) by cutting vital programs, delaying payments to schools and issuing bonds against future tobacco settlement monies. Of course, they have been boasting that they balanced the budget without raising taxes, but in reality all they did was pass the buck to localities. Literally. Their cowardice and unwillingness to consider Governor Dayton’s proposal to ask the wealthiest Minnesotans to pay a little more in income taxes is astounding and is resulting in a new kind of “trickle down” economics that we’re seeing in more and more states.
This week the Star Tribune reported that in November a record number of Minnesota school districts – 133 to be precise – will be asking taxpayers to support referendums to help “ward off cuts that have condensed class schedules, provoked higher pay-to-play fees and forced schools to resort to in-school advertising to make ends meet.” Some school districts are accepting ads on student lockers and in mailings to parents. Other still have invited businesses to parent-teacher conferences to hawk their wares, and many have increased parking fees for students. All at a time when 40 percent of school aged children in Minnesota are eligible for reduced cost meals because their parents are already facing their own hard times.
In the St. Cloud area, some local officials are reeling from the impact of the state budget, which reduced the property tax base for some localities and cut local aid. As St. Cloud Mayor (and former state senator) Dave Kleis put it, “There’s certainly a tendency to shift that burden onto those local communities.”
With the multiple fiscal pressures cities face, state legislators who balance their budgets by cutting local funds are putting short-term political gains over the long term economic health of their citizens.
The stupidity of stinting education, especially by pushing costs to the local level where poor communities are disproportionately harmed, beggars belief. But putting school spending on tobacco settlement money, which should be used to pay for medical care, not only beggars belief, it takes the money from the beggar’s cup.
Tax fantasies were on full display during the Tea Party debate as well. The most blatant lie was Romney’s claim that Obama raised taxes. CTJ:
Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney made misleading statements about President Barack Obama’s tax record, claiming that Obama “had raised taxes $500 billion.” What’s deceptive about this is that while Obama raised taxes by $500 billion dollars (mostly through the progressive tax included in the healthcare reform bill), he has simultaneously cut taxes overall by more than double that. Specifically, Obama cut taxes by $243 billion as part of the economic recovery act in 2009, $654 billion as part of the tax compromise he signed at the end of 2010, and is now proposing $240 billion in additional payroll tax cuts, to say nothing of his proposal to continue 81 percent of the Bush tax cuts and other smaller tax cuts at a cost of an additional $3.5 trillion.
Realistically, Obama cut taxes in net by about $4 TRILLION dollars. This is what passes for a tax hike in Republican circles. CTJ, don’t call it “misleading.” It’s a lie.
CTJ cites additional tax lies, notably those of Michelle Bachmann:
Minnesota Rep. Michelle Bachmann attempted to rewrite fiscal history by claiming that the reason the deficit went “up and up and up” during the past decade was not due to the Bush tax cuts, but rather trillions in increased spending. In reality however, the Bush tax cuts were the primary driver of the deficit during the Bush years, adding some $2.5 trillion to the deficit from 2001-2010.
Still, it would do well to mention that the wars, including the sometimes wildly unconstitutional Department of Heimat… er, Homeland… Security and the Pharmaceutical Profit Maximization Act…that is, Medicare D… have contributed substantially to the deficit. Republicans, however, seem to believe that it is black women on welfare who suck up all the federal dollars, when social support is at disastrously low levels.
As long as Republicans feel free to tell such outrageous lies without fear of contradiction, as long as basic national needs like education have to be stinted so that corrupt contractors can conduct (and, as we will eventually find out when the truth about the alienation of the population of the occupied lands becomes undeniable, lose) unnecessary wars, the country cannot find the right course.
