Lying almost without lying

The Republicans in Congress are united in trying to get the Bush tax cuts made permanent instead of being allowed to lapse.

A key argument they make is that many small business owners have incomes over $250,000 a year, and so taxing them more is a "job killer." Note the "job killer" is the GOP's favorite catchphrase this year, for obvious reasons.

But only 3% of small business owners have incomes that high. And as labor pundit Robert Reich observes, most of those "small businesses" are actually individuals with few or no employees, who've incorporated themselves as "small businesses" for tax purposes. Think doctors, lawyers, investment bankers.

And because they hire few or no people regardless of whether their income goes up or down, taxing them has zero impact on the number of jobs out there.

Moreover, letting the Bush tax cuts lapse returns us to the tax structure of the Clinton years--in which far more jobs were created than in the Bush tax cut years.

But apart from the particulars of this argument, see how they lie? They classify as "small businesses" entities that aren't what most people think of when you use that term. BTW they also include as "small businesses" hedge funds with billionaire managers and Price Waterhouse to boot. But if you torture the term "small business" they aren't exactly lying.

But then they build an authentic lie on top of that deception: that restoring Clinton era taxes would be a "job killer." I can only assume they're hoping to trigger such fear and anger in voters that they lose their powers of reason. That's certainly worked before often enough.

And in fact the real "job killer" is supply-side voodoo economics. Giving rich people more has created lots of jobs--in China, India, Malaysia and elsewhere as they've offshored manufacturing. And rich people's own job-creating consumerism is microscopic compared to that of a bunch of middle class people if they, in aggregate, had the same income as that rich person.

Consumer spending overall is down today because ALL of the increase in worker productivity since around 1980 has been appropriated by America's billionaire class once you adjust for inflation. So people are working harder for the same or less than before.

As was also true in 1929--the last time the disparity in wages was this great. That disparity went down and stayed down until the late 1970s, but has been increasing ever since--and still is.