Diary: Newspapers and Their Lack of Credibility on Taxes

In a last-minute attempt to scare Americans away from the Barack Obama candidacy for President, right-wing propagandist Deroy Murdock penned in his syndicated newspaper column the usual taxes-and-goblins claptrap the political right has used for decades against progressive governance.

And editors of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, as well as other newspapers who publish Murdock, should be ashamed of themselves for printing fraudulent claims by a person who has no business being a columnist while avoiding truthful counter arguments to his false statements.

One such false statement - seen often in America's newspapers, including the P-I, but seldom refuted - was advanced days before the election by Murdock of Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Under the headline "The audacity of Obama's brand-new taxes" Murdock wrote:

"Barack Obama promises to return personal income taxes to Clinton-era levels, with the top rate rising from 35 percent to 39.6. His agenda -- call it "No Tax Hike Left Behind" -- boosts levies on capital gains (from 15 percent to 20), dividends (from 15 percent to 20), and death (from 0 percent in 2010 to 45, on estates exceeding $7 million).

"These increases among existing taxes would work like brass knuckles on a wobbly economy. Even worse, Obama also proposes brand-new taxes that further threaten to pulverize growth and jobs."

The column, which presented a dire future based on Murdock's biases and lack of knowledge, was nonsense. This is not the first time the P-I, which poses as a progressive voice in Seattle publishing, has printed this malarkey and, as always in the past, the newspaper refused to publish as much as a letter to the editor proving the argument to be garbage.

For truth, consider recent history.

Ronald Reagan orchestrated massive tax increases in the early 1980s during a "wobbly economy" in its worst slump since the Great Depression. Those increases didn't "work like brass knuckles" on the economy and didn't "pulverize growth and jobs." Instead, the increases preceded the economic expansion the political right has dubbed "the Reagan Miracle" that produced close to 15 millions new jobs, according to the right, even though a good portion of the new jobs replaced the millions lost during Reagan's recession in which 12 million Americans were unemployed. Reagan's job-creation rate of 2.1 percent annually was among the lowest since the Great Depression, topping only those of Gerald Ford, Dwight Eisenhower and the two George Bushes.

As the "Miracle" waned and the US slipped into a "wobbly economy" under George Bush the Daddy in the early 1990s, senior Bush pushed tax increases through Congress and that preceded a slow-and-steady economic recovery that reclaimed numerous jobs.

When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, he said he found the economy in worse shape than his predecessor admitted and pushed through new tax increases. The greatest economic growth in history followed those tax increases, showing that raising taxes does not "work like brass knuckles on a wobbly economy" and does not "pulverize growth and jobs." Instead, the economy produced an estimated 20 million to 22 million new jobs in the seven years following the tax increases, according to various accounts.

This does not mean that tax increases lead to job creation and economic growth, it only means that tax increases, done right, don't harm the economy.

And, tax cuts, done wrong, can hurt the economy and do not lead to prosperity.

Reagan pushed massive tax cuts for millionaires and corporations through a Republican Senate and conservative House in 1981 and that preceded his severe recession that saw unemployment rise to 10.8%, the highest it had been since 1940 when the nation was still in the depression. George W. Bush the Junior pushed similar tax cuts through the Republican Congress in 2001 and we had an official recession before the 9/11 attack.

Now we heard bickering by candidates of both parties - but mostly on the political right - about new and bigger tax cuts on the fallacious argument that they're needed to create new and better jobs. Since tax cuts failed to create jobs in the past, why should we expect them to do so now?

We are in the present economic mess for several reasons, one being a $10-trillion debt brought about by massive tax cuts that didn't produce economic expansion or any new jobs but which drains billions of dollars from the US economy each year to pay interest to debt holders in the Mideast, China and other foreign nations. Draining such amounts of money from the United States economy deprives this nation of the cash it needs to produce economic growth. And massive tax cuts produced multimillion-dollar salaries and bonuses for the financial executives who drove the financial bus into the ditch.

But politicians who ran for the presidency and vice presidency, governorships, the Senate and the US House of Representatives could only promise more of the same.

Arguments such as presented by Murdock only threaten to make matters worse. If the P-I and other newspapers feel a need to publish right-wing columnists to counterbalance views on their op-ed pages, they should look for conservatives who deal in reality and truth, if such creatures can be found. Newspapers nationwide continue to lose credibility with readers, and actions such as this in which a lie is continually published but truth showing it to be a lie is continually rejected may be a small reason why.