Playing fast and loose with facts?

Democrats seem to have the perception that if you say something often enough and with enough zeal it will become fact. This is the tactic that President Obama has successfully employed throughout his administration. Remember “if you like your doctor and insurance plan, you can keep them”?

Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber’s comments saying that they relied on lack of transparency and the stupidity of the American people to pass the Affordable Care Act emphasizes this principle. He admits that if the American people had been told the truth, Obamacare would never have passed. However, he said, it was all worth it to see that the law passed. In other words, the ends justify the means.

Columnist Gene Lyons seems to be engaging some of the same kind of tactics in his article, “Two More Years of Animal House GOP,” published in the Daily Inter Lake on Nov. 13. In this article, he has done an excellent job of tweaking the facts, as Democrats often do, to fit his narrative. How so, you ask? 

Let’s begin with Lyons’ assertion that Clinton’s 1993 tax increases were responsible for “25 million new jobs and a balanced budget.”

Economist Dr. Thomas Sowell refers to this type of claim as a “fable” in some of his writing. It is true, Sowell says, that the last time the federal government had a budget surplus, Bill Clinton was president, so it was called the Clinton surplus. That’s where some of the true facts are conveniently left out of Lyons’ scenario. 

The truth is this surge in the economy began in 1997. By that time Republicans had gained control of the House, and had convinced Clinton to lower taxes. The balanced budget and the budget surplus were not generated by Clinton’s tax increase but rather the 1997 tax cuts passed at the insistence of the Republican Congress.

In fact, a 1995 Wall Street Journal article by Martin Feldstein, former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, provides a true picture of what occurred following Clinton’s 1993 tax increase.

He said “[Clinton’s] ’93 tax increases failed to generate the revenue he had expected.” According to him this was because “taxpayers reduced their incomes when they saw the tax hikes coming.” As a result he said, “The Treasury lost two-thirds of the extra revenue that would have been collected if taxpayers had not changed their behavior.” In today’s world, there are many ways of decreasing taxable income besides tax-exempt bonds.

Democrats won’t tell you either that history has proven, even though Lyons declares it has “never actually happened in the visible world,” that lowering taxes provides more revenue from those in the highest income brackets. Calvin Coolidge did in the 1920s as did Ronald Reagan, John Kennedy, and G.W. Bush. They all lowered tax rates and, without exception, it resulted in more tax revenue from the very top income earners.

Turning to Gene Lyons’ comments regarding the voters not understanding “how deep and dangerous a hole the economy had fallen into in 2008” — that part may be true, but he conveniently failed to reveal what played a major role in that financial market crisis.

Lyons glossed over the fact that, in 1995, the Democratic controlled Congress with Bill Clinton changed the Community Reinvestment Act. The result was that this law was used to pressure banks to lower their lending standards and increase the number of loans in poor neighborhoods.

What difference did it make to the banks as long as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were willing to buy these subprime loans? According to a Housing Department report, “From 1993 to 1998 the number of subprime refinance [loans] increased tenfold.”

This created an unsustainable real estate bubble, which crashed when people could not meet their mortgage payments. This resulted in one of the biggest government bailouts of all time to save the banks as well as Fannie and Freddie.

What most people don’t remember is that in 2004, four years before the crash, President Bush tried to warn congress that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac needed to be reined in. A letter followed this warning from 76 members of Congress, including Barney Frank Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, and Charles Rangel (all Democrats) that he was wrong and the warning went unheeded. 

The rest is history. Borrowing from Lyons’ vernacular, many people won’t know any of this, unless Republicans inform them.

Still is a resident of Kalispell.