By Ben Fritz
The Daily Mislead, a project of the liberal organization MoveOn.org, claims to provide "an accurate daily chronicle for journalists of misrepresentations, distortions and downright misleading statements by President Bush and the Bush Administration." Much of its work, however, consists of little more than partisan disagreements and ideological attacks. By disguising its opposition to Bush as objective analysis of dishonesty, The Mislead only makes the problem of out-of-control political spin worse. (Read the whole column.)
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By Bryan Keefer
Recently several prominent conservatives have unfairly attacked the economic plans of Democratic presidential candidates using misleading tactics similar to those the Bush administration has employed in the past.
The attacks have centered on proposals by a number of Democrats to repeal all or part of the tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003. On December 3, Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie gave a speech in New Hampshire in which he stated:
Consider this: Every single Democrat running for President today is for raising taxes on working Americans. They're split on a lot of things, but when it comes to raising taxes, they're unanimous!
[Democratic Presidential hopeful Gen. Wesley] Clark said here last night he wants to raise taxes on the top 2% of earners, and he wants to create jobs. But 70% of those earners he wants to raise taxes on are small businesses owners. 80% of the tax relief for upper income filers goes to small businesses that are responsible for creating 75% of new jobs in America. You can't raise taxes on small businesses and create jobs at the same time.
The overall effect of Gillespie's statement is to imply that the vast majority of the cuts for upper-income earners enacted in 2001 and 2003 go directly to small businesses. This is deeply misleading. First, the cuts that Gillespie mentions are for individuals, not for businesses themselves. In addition, Gillespie, as the Bush administration has done, is counting anyone with any small business income as an owner. As the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) pointed out earlier this year, many of those owners are passive investors rather than an "owner" in the sense he is suggesting. Finally, while Gillespie correctly notes that small businesses are responsible for creating 75 percent of new jobs, only 2 percent of small businesses pay income taxes at the top marginal rate (as CBPP has noted) and would be affected by the proposed repeal.
In a separate but similar attack on Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean, a conservative group called the Club for Growth is running a misleading ad in Iowa and New Hampshire suggesting that "Howard Dean says he'll raise taxes on the average family by more than nineteen hundred dollars a year. Dean says he'll raise income taxes, marriage taxes, capital gains taxes, dividend taxes, even bring back the death tax."
The $1,900 figure appears to be based on a Treasury Department statistic that that a married couple with two children making $40,000 a year would be subject to such an increase. This claim appears to have debuted in a June 22, 2003 interview with Dean on NBC's "Meet the Press" where host Tim Russert stated that those numbers had been provided to him by the Treasury Department. (In a press release, the Club for Growth cited an unspecified Treasury Department study.)
However, as we have noted before, this "average" family is far from typical, benefiting disproportionately from the child tax credit and the marriage penalty phaseout. CBPP points out that 52 percent of households would see their taxes rise by $500 or less if the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts were repealed; only 20 percent would see their taxes go up by $1,700 or more. Finally, since the estate tax (which the ad labels the "death tax") does not phase out fully until 2010, it is incorrect to suggest that Dean would "bring [it] back."
These misleading attacks extend the Bush administration's use of similarly deceptive statistics during its sales campaign for the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. Gillespie and the Club for Growth have demonstrated that these tactics have helped set the tone for the presidential campaign season.
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