Wrong is WRONG. It is not "debatable"

Last night Bill Maher hit on an anooyance of mine for the last several years. When right-wingers screw up, their record of error is never held to account. The main point starts around 2:00 in.



See, you can throw your opinion out there and see if it happens. It's a free country and that's what we call freedom. But WHEN YOU'RE WRONG, you lose credibility. When you say "tax cuts increase revenue" and ignore the last 30 years of evidence which show that argument to be a fallacy, you should be ignored and taken out of any kind of serious discussion. But instead people like Paul Ryan are allowed to continue to be let on Sunday morning talk shows to portray this image of some kind of "expert" on economic issues. WHY?

And it's not like these things aren't available to the public. Hell, here's Ryan from 10 years ago arguing in favor of stimulus as a way to help a stagnant economy.

  And we know that Ryan asked for stimulus funds in his district, with evidence that Ryan asked for even more government pork than we already knew. But yet Ryan was up there at Thursday night's debate saying he's never backed stimulus and that it "never works." Neither of these statements are true, and as I've mentioned before, the drop in the U.S. unemployment rate under Obama really isn't much different than when a teenage Paul Ryan was saying it was "Morning in America" during Ronald Reagan's re-election in 1984.

And remember these charts, which show when taxes are cut for the rich and corporate and trade barriers are taken down, money has been funneled away from wages and into profits for the last 30 years? And the only exception to this was in the 1990s when the top marginal tax rates were raised to 39%.  

Wages as % of GDP

Corporate profits as % of GDP

Top 10% incomes vs. bottom 90%, last 100 years

Income distribution 1979-2007

Trickle-down HAS FAILED and it has failed for a long time. Right-wingers lie and get it wrong. So how can anyone knowing these FACTS (not opinions, GOP, but facts and records) give these people any credibility at the ballot box?

To paraphrase Biden from Thursday (and what I'd better hear from Obama next Tuesday) "Use your common sense and experience, folks. You know the GOP's economic policies don't work. So why would we ever go back to them?"