Economy

Fox News Can’t Stop Lying About Tax Cuts For The Middle Class

Posted by on July 9, 2012 at 10:33 am. 12 Comments :

The announcement today that President Obama is committed to preserving the current tax rates for middle class Americans has been met by Fox News choosing to frame the issue in a more negative and dishonest manner.

Fox News

On the Fox News web site the story was featured with a headline reading, “Obama ‘100% Committed’ To Tax Hike.” Later, on Fox News as the President was speaking, the network displayed a caption reading, “Pres Urges Congress To Pass Tax Increase On Households Earning More Than $250,000.”

Both of those statements are false. The President is neither committed to, nor urging, a tax increase. The tax increasing was passed and signed into law by Republican president George W. Bush. The legislation implementing the Bush-era tax cuts included a sunset provision for when the cuts would expire. That was Bush’s doing, not Obama’s. What Obama is trying to do is to preserve the tax cuts for the vast majority of Americans who actually need them and will spend them to help the economy grow. It is flat out dishonest to say that, because Obama supports allowing the cuts to expire for a few people at the top of the economic scale, that he is proposing a tax increase as characterized by Fox News.

Deficit FactorsMost independent economists agree that lower taxes for the middle class is more likely to fuel economic growth because the middle class spends more of their money on cars, clothes, food, appliances, electronics, travel, etc. The rich, on the other hand, disperses more of their income to savings or retirement accounts that do nothing to stimulate the economy. And studies have proven that the Bush-era tax cuts are one of the biggest contributors to the deficit.

The President is making a rational proposal that Congress come together and agree to pass the middle class relief that both sides insist is necessary to spur growth. There is simply no reason not to do so. The question of whether to cut taxes further for the rich can be debated separately and need not put everyone else at risk. If Republicans refuse to do this because the wealthy are being left out, then they are effectively holding the majority of Americans hostage on behalf of helping millionaires become even richer. But then, that’s the mission of the GOP (Greedy One Percent).

These facts are available for everyone to see and factor into their appraisal of the current economic debate. Everyone except for Fox News viewers, that is. They will continue to be misinformed and subject to opinions that are contrary to reality and harmful to their own interests.

Fox Nation Panic: Run For The Hills, The World Is Ending

Posted by on May 5, 2012 at 10:39 am. 2 Comments :

Sell! Sell! Sell! It’s all over. The stock market is collapsing. Wall Street is bankrupt. The economy is toast. Head for your bunker with your gold bullion, guns, and bibles. The End Times are here.

Fox Nation is feverishly reporting that “Stocks Tank, Nasdaq’s Worst Week Of 2012.” If this isn’t evidence of Armageddon, I don’t know what is.

Fox Nation - Stocks Tank

After this horrific market crash the NASDAQ will only be up 13.5% year-to-date – a mere nine times more than what the average bank savings account is earning for the whole year. If you listened to Fox you would have missed out on one of the most precipitous stock rallies in decades.

And when was the last time that Fox reported that the market was significantly higher in any week this year? Good luck finding that report. Fox is on a mission to make President Obama and his administration look bad. That requires trumpeting bad news about the economy and ignoring the good news.

The problem is that by doing that, Fox also exacerbates negativity that can have the effect of producing a self-fulfilling prophecy and frighten people out of the market. But Fox doesn’t care about that. Hurting Obama is more important to Fox than accurately reporting on the economy.

Fox News Revives Lie To Advocate Raising Taxes On The Poor

Posted by on February 23, 2012 at 10:54 pm. 11 Comments :

Every year around early April, Fox News unpacks a phony statistic about taxpayers in order to imply that many Americans don’t pay taxes at all. They are starting a little early this year.

Fox News - Neil Cavuto

Neil Cavuto, the VP of business news at Fox, must know better when he alleges that 49.5% of Americans do not pay taxes. The truth is that they pay about the same tax rate as other Americans, just no “federal” taxes. And there is a good reason for that. Most of the citizens in this category are either seniors living on Social Security, students with little or no income, and the working poor who earn less than the statutory minimums to be liable for federal levies. They do, however, pay state and local taxes, sales taxes, mortgage taxes, and payroll taxes. But that doesn’t stop Fox from repeatedly asserting the lie that they pay no taxes at all.

By complaining that these disadvantaged people are tantamount to freeloaders, Cavuto is in effect advocating an increase in taxes for the poor. While he and his right-wing cohorts fight tooth and nail to protect wealthy individuals and corporations from contributing even modest amounts to the nation’s recovery, they are enthusiastically in favor of soaking the poor in order to heal the malaise on Wall Street and the misery of long-suffering bankers. It’s nice to see that these conservative, anti-tax zealots have finally found a class of people whose taxes they want to raise.

The phrase that Cavuto used repeatedly is that “everyone has [to have] skin in the game.” The arrogance dripping from that commentary is that it assumes that those not paying federal income taxes do not already have skin in the game. Cavuto thinks that people who have spent a lifetime paying into the system, and are now struggling to survive in retirement, haven’t sacrificed enough. He thinks that the unemployed would prefer to remain that way rather than find jobs and resume payments to the IRS. That’s an astoundingly stupid point of view that demonstrates just how ignorant he is of economics and the plight of people less fortunate than he is. But surprisingly, it isn’t the stupidest thing he said. In his program’s sarcastic epilogue he issued this order to the folks who are already undergoing significant hardships:

“Stop demanding benefits from a system you give nothing.”

Really? Let me get this straight. If you are so broke that you can’t pay for taxes – or housing or food – then you should not be getting any benefits from the social safety nets set up to provide housing and food for the poor? Apparently Cavuto thinks that such benefits should only go to people who already have money.

To say that the poor should stop demanding benefits because they are poor is like chastising a child for wanting to be adopted just because she’s an orphan. What a selfish freeloader. And she’s just the sort of ne’er-do-well from whom Cavuto would like to steal candy.

Fox Nation vs. Reality: Stimulating Unemployment

Posted by on February 22, 2012 at 11:03 am. 40 Comments :

In yet another example of the intentionally deceptive news perverters at Fox News, the Fox Nation website has posted a headline article that deliberately misrepresents reality with this headline: WH Senior Advisor: Unemployment Stimulates the Economy.

Fox Nation

That would be a remarkably stupid comment if anyone had actually said it. What Valerie Jarrett actually said was that…

“Even though we had a terrible economic crisis three years ago, throughout our country many people were suffering before the last three years, particularly in the black community. And so we need to make sure that we continue to support that important safety net. It not only is good for the family, but it’s good for the economy. People who receive that unemployment check go out and spend it and help stimulate the economy, so that’s healthy as well.“

So what Jarrett was talking about was the stimulative effect of unemployment insurance, not unemployment. And her views on continuing to support Americans struggling in this difficult economic environment are consistent with most economists who recognize that funds received in the form of unemployment checks are quickly spent in the communities of the beneficiary, creating an economic stimulus.

“Many analysts, including the Congressional Budget Office as well as [Moody’s Mark] Zandi, have found that in a weak economy, UI and refundable tax credits — and other measures that put money into the hands of hard-pressed individuals and families who will spend it — have a significantly larger impact on economic activity and job creation than tax cuts primarily benefiting high-income individuals, who are likely to save a large amount of any increase in income they receive. In the Moody’s Analytics model, extending unemployment insurance benefits generates $1.60 of additional GDP for each dollar of budgetary cost, while a permanent extension of all of the Bush-era income tax cuts generates only 35 cents in economic activity per dollar of cost.”

The Fox Nationalists frequently lie about the economic benefits of aid to working class Americans, but this intentional misrepresentation of Jarrett’s remarks is even more dishonest than their routine dishonesty. I’m sure they are very proud of themselves.

Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Gas Price Myth

Posted by on February 17, 2012 at 2:32 pm. 3 Comments :

Fox Nation has joined Fox News and most of the right-wing noise machine in attempting to slow President’s Obama’s increasing popularity due to the recent trends in the improving economic and employment numbers. They have settled on the issue of rising gas prices as a means of disrupting the President’s positive momentum.

Fox Nation

The only problem with asserting that Obama is responsible for a massive spike in gas prices is that it doesn’t happen to be true. The 83% figure was derived from calculating gas price changes from Obama’s inauguration to the present. But that doesn’t take into account that in the weeks prior to the inauguration there was a worldwide economic meltdown that was the catalyst for a precipitous drop in gas prices. As noted by economists at the time, “The overwhelming cause of the collapse in oil prices has been the faltering world economy, which has fueled the drop in consumption.”

Here are the facts: Gas prices peaked at $4.12 per gallon in the summer of 2008. By the time Obama was inaugurated the following January, the Bush recession that began in the fall had caused prices to drop to $1.61. While everyone likes lower gas prices, nobody wants them to decline due to people being too poor to purchase it. But that’s what happened in late 2008.

Arguably, the rise in gas prices since then validates the Obama economic revival that has produced higher retail fuel consumption. So a proper comparison would not begin at the lowest point of a recession that Obama had nothing to do with. It would begin from the pre-recession market until the present. By that measure gas is 17% lower.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for Fox News to present these facts, or any others that make the President look good. Their mission to destroy this presidency and anything that resembles progressivism is more important to Fox than facts.

Sarah Palin’s Top Seven CPAC Hack Attacks And Lies

Posted by on February 12, 2012 at 12:00 pm. 7 Comments :

There is no better example of the right’s embrace of idiocy than the rise of Sarah Palin. Conservatives take great pains to refudiate attacks on her intelligence (or lack thereof), but the very fact that they have to rush to her defense so often is evidence of her stupefying ignorance. You never see conservatives forced to defend Karl Rove on those grounds. Liberals may strongly disagree with him but they don’t doubt his IQ.

Palin, on the other hand, is a walking fountain of embarrassing witlessisms. And her keynote speech yesterday at CPAC contributed another mother lode of lunacy. As was to be expected, the bulk of her bluster was aimed squarely at Barack Obama, whom she can only see in terms of evil and strident anti-Americanism. This approach is well received by the simple-minded audience at CPAC that regards cracks about community organizing as worthy of a standing ovation. Surprisingly, the crowd was unfazed by Palin’s use of Satan’s own speaking device: the TelePrompTer.

Sarah Palin at CPAC

However, Palin saved some of her bile for fellow Republican Mitt Romney. She did not mention him by name, but it was clear to whom she was referring when she said that she hoped the nominating process would continue, even to the convention. And it was likewise obvious that Palin was smacking Romney when she said that…

“Our candidate must be someone who can instinctively turn right to constitutional, conservative principles. It’s too late in the game to teach it or spin it at this point. It’s either there or it isn’t.”

But the real entertainment was spread throughout Palin’s address. While there was virtually nothing of substance, there was an abundance of blatant applause lines that fed the Pavlovian lust of the CPACers. Here are just a few of the most mentally deficient snippets from her harangue:

1) [Obama] promised to transform America, and that’s one promise he kept, transforming a shining city on a hill into a sinking ship.
Remember how shiny America was in 2008 when the McCain/Palin ticket was so soundly defeated? The economy was in free fall, we were bleeding jobs, and there were two wars in progress. Obama took command of this ship after Bush and the GOP had already run it into an iceberg, and he has managed to keep it afloat and steer it back into safer waters.

2) When I listened to his State of the Union last month, I was really struck that he barely mentioned unemployment.
Which State of the Union was she listening to? It certainly wasn’t the one Obama delivered where he mentioned “jobs” 33 times. Her dreadful comprehension skills may explain why she was unable to answer a gotcha question like “What do you read?”

3) He’ll invest your money in bullet trains to nowhere, but he’ll stop Boeing from building airplanes anywhere.
It takes balls for Palin to reference the “bridge to nowhere” that was a boondoggle she supported in her home state of Alaska. And it’s no less ballsy to berate initiatives like high-speed rail that would create jobs and improve the infrastructure for commerce. Also, The NLRB decision to oppose Boeing’s plan to to move their facilities to South Carolina was intended to save the jobs of workers that Boeing proposed to abandon in Washington state.

4) We have a better job plan and it’s called the free market. And it worked before this president, and it will work again after this president.
Well, except for this:

Job Creation

5) He says that we need more of his financial regulations. We say go ask MF Global customers how happy they are with his regulatory agencies. Where were they when Jon Corzine lost $1.2 billion of customer funds?
Exactly! Where were Obama’s regulatory agencies? They were tied up by Palin’s Republican pals in Congress who refused to pass the bills that would create them or to confirm the department heads who would manage them. And isn’t Palin thoughtful for showing her concern about a billion dollars lost by wealthy hedge fund investors, but no such concern for hundreds of billions lost by average American homeowners?

6) We’re gonna put our confidence in the strength of our armed forces, not the hollow promises of our adversaries and not the cleverness of our diplomats and our bureaucrats.
So Palin advocates only military solutions to foreign policy disputes. She just can’t abide clever diplomats that could defuse an international crisis and avoid putting American lives at risk, not to mention saving billions of dollars that would be spent at war. Something tells me that even our armed forces would rather rely on diplomacy first.

7) We’ve suffered massive job losses out there. But Washington is hiring.
Actually, there have been 3,000,000 jobs created in the private sector in the past two years. Government jobs, however, have declined by 2.6% during the Obama administration. That’s a record. Obama has done more to shrink government than even Ronald Reagan.

Sitting through Palin’s speech was an excruciating ordeal. Her screechy whine was itself torturous, but the ignorance infused with every sentence, and the cheers it elicited from the undiscriminating crowd, was like aural tasering. Imagine my relief when she came to the obligatory “God bless America” and the end was in sight. However, the final punch line was her selection of Shania Twain’s “Not Just A Pretty Face” to accompany her exit from the stage. It’s amazing that the ego that approved that song can fit into her miniaturized brain.

Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Obama Downgrade Threat

Posted by on February 9, 2012 at 10:59 am. 1 Comments :

Once again Fox News has twisted the facts of a breaking story beyond all recognition. The headline on their Fox Nation blog reads: S&P Threatens Obama With Another Downgrade.

Fox Nation

The Fox Nationalists link to an article on Zero Hedge where the original headline says: S&P Threatens US With Another Downgrade. That is an obviously more accurate representation of the opinion expressed by S&P’s John Chambers, who was not threatening Obama at all. The prospect of another credit rating downgrade was directed at the United States, not the White House. Furthermore, its impact will be felt by the nation as a whole, not by the President as an individual.

If anything, the threat was aimed more at Congress, because that is where the budget is drafted, and it is where S&P has previously laid the blame for the downgrade. In their decision last August to drop the U.S. from AAA to AA+, S&P hammered at the disfunctionality of the Tea Party purists in the House who seemed to hunger for an American default:

[T]he downgrade reflects our view that the effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policymaking and political institutions have weakened at a time of ongoing fiscal and economic challenges […] The political brinksmanship of recent months highlights what we see as America’s governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective, and less predictable than what we previously believed. The statutory debt ceiling and the threat of default have become political bargaining chips in the debate over fiscal policy.

Tea Party DowngradeChambers noted in his latest comments that the “political brinkmanship hasn’t gone away. That simply doesn’t happen in other AAA economies.” Indeed, the same intransigent Tea Party extremists are presently attempting to welch on prior agreements on payroll tax cuts and budget reductions stipulated by the failure of the so-called Super Committee to arrive at a compromise spending bill.

The absurdity of Fox Nation trying to suggest that S&P is threatening Obama makes more sense when you recognize that the mission of Fox News is to disparage the President at every conceivable opportunity. They don’t care whether or not the criticism is factual. The only thing they are concerned with is their obsession with personalizing every negative event as being solely attributable to Obama in particular and Democrats in general. That agenda is not only dishonest, but it is also harmful in that it distracts from the real concerns presented by potential occurrences that will affect the entire nation and every citizen in it.

Fox News doesn’t care about the harm it produces. It only cares about harming Obama and running him out of Washington. Never mind that even if they were successful it wouldn’t change the S&P analysis one bit since it is Congress who is responsible for the budget. The determination of Fox News to harm the country is evident everyday. It is evident in their lamenting of lower unemployment rates, which they dismiss as contrived. And it is evident in their disdain for improvements in American manufacturing in auto and other industries. If there is one thing that is clear about Fox News it is that they revel in bad news for America and they are willing to hurt the country in order to achieve their rightist political goals.

Fox News Is SHOCKED That Obama Has Christian Values

Posted by on February 2, 2012 at 11:32 am. 4 Comments :

Seriously, Fox News? Are you seriously expressing disdain for President Obama’s remarks at the annual National Prayer Breakfast about how his faith has helped form his policy opinions?

Fox Nation

The arch-conservative, fundamentalists in America have spent decades insisting that America is a Christian nation and that the country must submit to their spiritual dogma. They have attempted to, and in many cases succeeded in, passing bills that legislatively adopt their religious principles, from abortion to creationism. And Fox Pews…I mean News has adopted the crusade of the religious right as their own.

The one Christian principle that is almost always left out of the fundamentalist agenda is the one that preaches compassion for the poor and Jesus’ admonition that “whatever you do (do not do) for the least of these you do (do not do) for me.” Now when the President articulates his principles of Christian faith at a prayer breakfast he is criticized for it with a distinct implication that it was somehow inappropriate.

OK, fine. Let’s all agree that injecting religion into public policy is inadvisable and promise to refrain from doing it. But that has to apply to all sides. The Christian Taliban can no longer try to shove its philosophy down the throats of their fellow citizens. There will be no more sermonizing on God’s alleged will. No more phony wars on Christmas. No more prayers to open congressional hearings. And if the right will not agree to these terms, then they have to shut up when the President makes barely religious comments like this:

“When I talk about our financial institutions playing by the same rules as folks on Main Street, when I talk about making sure insurance companies aren’t discriminating against those who are already sick or making sure that unscrupulous lenders aren’t taking advantage of most vulnerable among us, I do so because I genuinely believe it will make the economy stronger for everybody. But I also do it because I know far too many neighbors in our country have been hurt and treated unfairly over the last few years. And I believe in God’s command to ‘love thy neighbor as thyself.”

[…] “I actually think that is going to make economic sense, but for me as a Christian, it also coincides with Jesus’s teaching that ‘for unto whom much is given, much shall be required.'”

Unfortunately, the Evangelicans will never surrender their arrogant superiority long enough to permit America to have true freedom of religion. And they will likewise refuse to refrain from castigating Democrats when they exercise their religious liberties. That’s just the nature of the sanctimonious hypocrisy embraced by the practitioners of religious tyranny.

NO KIDDING: Mitt Romney Says He Doesn’t Care About The Poor

Posted by on February 1, 2012 at 12:30 pm. 3 Comments :

File this under “Tell Me Something I Didn’t Know.”

Mitt Romney appeared on CNN this morning and told Soledad O’Brien something that was already known by anyone paying attention:

“I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs a repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich. They’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of America, the 90-95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.”

Romney’s qualification about the safety net is a weak argument for ceasing to care about people who are struggling to find work, to feed their children, and to pay for housing and health care. This is a statement that could only be made by someone so utterly lacking empathy and experience with anything outside of his millionaire bubble.

The poor in America are all too familiar with the safety net’s shortcomings. A politician can reasonably choose to focus on middle class issues, but to say aloud that they don’t care about poor people reveals something fundamentally amiss in their character. Especially if that politician is a multimillionaire.

Romney’s statement also asserts that he isn’tconcerned about the very rich. But if that’s true, then why is he struggling so feverishly to give them (him) additional tax cuts and federal benefits? For the rich people he doesn’t care about, he fights to increase their wealth. For the poor, he might try to fix some holes in the safety net if he determines it’s needed. That’s the perspective of a selfish elitist who has no idea what the nation is going through. And it’s a perspective that will make it very difficult for him to ever become president.

Occupy Reality: Americans Concern About Income Inequality Surges

Posted by on January 12, 2012 at 11:04 am. 3 Comments :

The Pew Research Center has conducted an inquiry into the degree of divisions within American society and found that conflicts between rich and poor now outpace other sources of group tension.

That result can only be interpreted as a success for the 99% and those who participated in the nationwide Occupy movement. They decisively altered the national dialogue from one that was obsessed with government spending and debt, to one that focused on economic justice and corporate abuse of power.

This is a terrible time for the GOP (Greedy One Percent) to be coalescing around Mitt Romney as their nominee for president. A multimillionaire, corporate raider who specializes in bankrupting companies and outsourcing jobs may not be the ideal candidate in this political environment. But, fortunately for Democrats, they are stuck with him.

The Wealth Gap in American is currently larger than it has ever been. It is larger than it was in the Great Depression. It is even larger than it was during the ancient Roman Empire that collapsed from the weight of its own injustice and oppression.

Click to enlarge
Decadence Index

The Republicans know all too well that their class war on behalf of the rich is toxic to their electoral aspirations. Their top strategist and pollster, Frank Luntz, has been counseling them to steer clear of debates on economic justice and free market capitalism. In a seminar for the Republican Governor’s Association he told them that he is “so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I’m frightened to death.” Even fellow Republicans are bashing the corporatist tendencies of Romney and his Bain Capital pedigree.

Not to be left out, Fox News joined the club by posting an article about the Pew survey on their Fox Nation web site. Consistent with their inbred bias, they mocked up a graphic that pastes Obama in front of the “Mission Accomplished” banner that George Bush made to pretend that the Iraq war was over, implying that Obama is responsible for the class tensions.

Fox Nation Rich/Poor Conflict

The problem with Fox’s characterization is that Obama was a late-comer to the issue. The people were way out in front of this and they overwhelming support the goals associated with the Occupy movement. And that includes many of the rich people we are supposed to be in conflict with. Notice how they never called it a class war until we fought back.

But more importantly, in their rush to smear the President, they are implicitly conceding that income inequality is a significant problem in America and that it is reaching an historic level of risk. Thanks Fox.