Fox News: Making Sure You Don’t Understand the Issues Since 1996
I am firmly convinced Fox hires editors and authors, not based on their qualifications to report on specific subjects, but based on their ability to confirm right wing biases and talking points. It is becoming so obvious to anyone with a bit of self honesty and is able to recognize and step back from their own biases that Fox News is catering to and I propose, training the readers and watchers to be as unable to see beyond their biases as is mentally possible.
In an article complaining about how Obama is not attacking Romney’s policies but is attacking Romney’s fitness for office, a tactic much beloved by the right, called ‘poisoning the well’ or ‘ad hominem’ (something that was done to Obama in 2008, and is a valid method if it addresses what the candidate him/herself is using as a campaign issue) the author proceeds to poison the well against the report Obama used as a political wedge in a recent speech.
FOX:
*Citing a report from the left-leaning Tax Policy Center, Obama said that Romney’s desire was to increase taxes on the middle class in order to offset revenues lost from tax breaks for the rich ‘like him.’
Well poisoning.
Framing Obama’s statement as a speculation on Romney’s personal desires makes it look like Obama is attacking Romney personally. It’s easy to show that Obama was talking about the effects policies Romney has leaned toward, but not fully qualified in a policy statement, will have on the US economy.
Here are Obama’s actual words:
OBAMA:
“He’s not asking you to contribute more to pay down the deficit, he’s not asking you to pay more to invest in our children’s education, or rebuild our roads or put more folks back to work. He’s asking you to pay more so that people like him can get a big tax cut,” Obama told a crowd in Mansfield, Ohio.
Obama used the personal pronoun ‘he’ as a proxy for the right and the results to be expected from his (Romney’s) tax policy as shown by the report.
One of the main findings in the report is that the tax burden will be shunted from higher income to lower income families.
FOX:
*The report speculates that in order for Romney to make his tax-cut plan ‘revenue neutral’ for the federal government, he and a theoretical Congress would have to close loopholes that would result in a net tax increase for middle-income earners.
REPORT:
**The above estimates assume that all available tax expenditures for higher-income households are completely eliminated—tax expenditures that include deductions for charitable contributions, mortgage interest, state and local taxes, and exclusions from income of health insurance and other fringe benefits. To the degree any of these were even partially retained for high-income households, the net tax cuts for high-income households and tax increases for low- and middle-income households would be even larger.
Note the point of it being ‘revenue neutral’ because that requirement limits the number of speculations that can be made in the various models. If taxes are reduced, in order to not increase the deficit, expenditures have to also be reduced (revenue neutral). Those reductions will hit middle and low income families the hardest.
REPORT:
** Specifically, it is not possible to design a revenue-neutral plan that does not reduce average tax burdens and the share of taxes paid by high-income taxpayers under the conditions described above, even when we try to make the plan as progressive as possible.
FOX:
*This is something like when Obama was running against Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget plan and his team came up with their own set of cuts to reach Ryan’s fiscal goals and then touted them as fact. Since Romney is not looking to discuss which loopholes he would close, each tax break having its own ardent supporters, Obama and the Tax Policy Center are filling in the void with their own projections.
This is answered by the quote from the report given above and by other sections of that report. Go here to read the whole thing.
FOX:
*This is all election-year blatherskite, since nobody knows what kind of Congress will be sitting come January or what condition the economy will be in a year from now. Change the set of assumptions and you change the outcome dramatically.
That is true as mentioned in the report - however, the outcomes get worse, not better.
FOX:
*What matters is the way Obama is making policy personal here.
Then why did you bother mentioning the report? Oh, I know, so you can link the report, its results and Obama into one nice compact package that can be vilified with just a flip of your hair.
The rest of the article is a lesson in how to stretch out a whine to a massive blubber while preserving your original bad premise.
* Read more: foxnews.com