The 9 Biggest Conservative Lies About Taxes and Public Spending

[LongTomH]

Joshua Holland deconstructs conservative disinformation about taxes and spending priorities:

1. Cutting Taxes Leads to More Money for the Government
   
2. Conservatives' Favorite Economist Proves the Point (Laffer Curve)
   
3. Taxes on the Rich Keep 'Wealth Producers' from 'Creating Jobs'
   
4. The Opposite: Tax Cuts for Upper Earners Spur Job Growth
   
5. Only Half of American Families Pay Taxes
   
6. Americans Are Taxed to Death
   
7. We're Being Killed by Runaway Government Spending
   
8. Conservatives Favor Low Taxes and Limited Government
   
9. Taxes on Top Earners Are Actually Taxes on 'Small Businesses'

Joshua Holland is a senior editor and contributor to AlterNet. His most recent book is: The Fifteen Biggest Lies About the Economy: And Everything Else the Right Doesn't Want You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America.

Holland has another op-ed at AlterNet: New Report Exposes Media Love Affair With Right-Wingers and the Fox News Worldview: 'Reporters Can't Get Enough', which uses more material from his book:

Forget about fake moon landings and Obama's birth certificate. The most enduring unfounded conspiracy theory in America is that our institutions of knowledge – the media, the academy and even science -- are biased in favor of liberals.t

The national media is based in large urban centers, so it should come as no surprise that conservatives would rarely see their views on strictly social issues well represented. But on matters of substance, we are talking about a corporate-owned media that pushes relentlessly for "free trade" deals, foreign wars and fiscal "austerity."

In my book, The Fifteen Biggest Lies About the Economy, I discuss how, beginning in the early 1970s, a number of wealthy conservative donors have invested in the development of what I call a parallel “intellectual infrastructure,” ostensibly designed to counter the liberal bias they saw all around them. They funded dozens of corporate-backed think tanks, endowed academic chairs, and created their own dedicated and distinctly conservative media outlets.

But the Right’s messaging isn't confined to the conservative media, in part because of the relentless pressure on newsrooms from conservative activists – it's an example of “working the refs.”

Some of this is what Bill Moyer referred to in his famed speech: This is the Fight of Our Lives, the battle the ultra-rich have fought since the 1970's (at least) to regain the rights they lost under The New Deal.

[toddwv]

1. Excellent article

loaded with information that people need to know.

[zbdent]

2. on the "media" being based in large urban centers ...

forever, the "conservative/corporate media" keeps lamenting the fact that Northeast Ohio (think Cleveland) is "overwhelmingly liberal" ...

and the mantra of the corporations is "giving the customers what they want" ...

so why do they only provide conservative, Republican/Rightwing talk radio hosts??? You'd think that the media would really get ratings with "liberal" talk, if the Cleveland/Northeast Ohio region is so "Democrat" and "liberal" ...

Reminds me of an old Wendy's commercial ... you have a "choice" of cars in "Soviet Union" ... two identical models, from the same manufacturer. Only the names of the cars are different. That's it. That sounds like the choices of talk radio in Northeast Ohio ... the only choices you have are conservative, conservative, conservative, conservative, conservative, conservative, conservative, and, to mix it up, conservative.