But the plan would have continued the present Medicare system indefinitely for those now getting benefits, and also for all those who reach age 65 during the next decade.
But the truth didn’t stop Democrats from misrepresenting the proposal shamelessly to scare senior citizens and win election votes. They tested this tactic in a May 26 special House election in New York state, running ads accusing the Republican candidate of endorsing a plan that would “essentially end Medicare” and amount to “cutting benefits for seniors,” claims that were far from the truth.
It worked: Democrat Kathy Hochul won in a district that normally leans Republican. So the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee rolled out even more misleading robotic telephone calls in 13 other House districts to soften up the Republican incumbents for 2012. These calls claimed the GOP House members cast a “vote to end Medicare.”
One independent liberal group even posted a widely seen Internet video of a man pushing a white-haired woman in a wheelchair (apparently well over age 55) to the edge of a scenic cliff and dumping her over it. It ends by asking, “Is America Beautiful without Medicare?” That bogus claim is being satirized by our new sister site, “FlackCheck.org,” which found it to be among the “Worst of the Worst” of 2011.
The truth is that not all Democrats think that changing Medicare in the way Republicans proposed is tantamount to murdering grannie. In fact, Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon joined Republican Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin on Dec. 14 to offer a bipartisan plan that is a modified version of the GOP plan Ryan authored earlier. And the New York Times noted Nov. 28 that there is growing support among some Democrats for reining in Medicare costs through a “premium support” system similar to the GOP plan if accompanied by enough safeguards.
But falsely claiming that any such change is an “end” to Medicare has already helped win one election for Democrats. So we suspect this whopper may be making our list again a year from now.
Test Market for Spin
May 19
DCCC Dials Wrong Number
June 13
Republican Whopper: Job-Killing ‘Small-Business’ Taxes
For years Republicans have been claiming that raising taxes on high-income individuals is equivalent to raising taxes on “small businesses” and thus killing jobs. We first debunked this big exaggeration in 2004, in fact.
This year, House Speaker John Boehner carried the idea to a new extreme with a claim that more than half of those who would be hit by a tax increase on “millionaires” are small-business owners: “the very people that we’re hoping will reinvest in our economy and create jobs.”
That’s rubbish. As we pointed out, only 13 percent of those reporting $1 million or more in income have even one-quarter of their earnings from small-business sources. The truth is that for the vast majority of those making over $1 million a year — a group that includes hedge-fund managers, corporate CEOs, owners of very large businesses and even wealthy coupon-clippers — any small-business income is incidental. Even Boehner’s spokesman admitted later that the speaker had, well, misspoken.
National Public Radio reporter Tamara Keith went searching for business owners who would be affected by the “millionaire” tax, but found that both the House and Senate GOP leadership was “unable to produce a single millionaire job creator for us to interview.” Undaunted, she asked for help from the business groups that have been lobbying against the surtax, but they couldn’t produce any millionaire job creator willing to talk either.
She finally found three who would talk — by cleverly posting a notice on Facebook. But none of them said an increase in the personal tax rate would inhibit them from trying to create jobs, contradicting this GOP whopper. One said, “What my business does is based on the contracts that it wins and the demand for its services,” and not the tax rate the owner pays on profits.
Boehner’s Big Stretch on Small Business
Nov. 9
Keith, Tamara. “GOP Objects To ‘Millionaires Surtax’; Millionaires We Found? Not So Much.” National Public Radio. 9 Dec 2011.
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