The Fifteen Biggest Lies about the Economy: And Everything Else the Right Doesn't Want You to Know about Taxes, Jobs, and Corporate America

404 Pages·2010·2.05 MB·English

by  Joshua Holland

Table of Contents

Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Using a Big Lie to Torpedo Financial Reform
What We’ve Lost
Class War and the Great Risk Shift
A One-Sided War
The Lies That Corporate America Tells Us
Chapter 1 - CONSERVATIVES DON’T WANT GOOD GOVERNMENT
The Right’s Roadmap for Economic Disaster
A Murderer’s Morality
The Seductive Lure of the Ownership Society
Ownership: A Conservative Spin on a Progressive Concept
Is Big Business Passing Itself Off as “Small Business”?
Chapter 2 - IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT THERE AREN’T ENOUGH GOOD
JOBS
What Happened to the American Dream?
Movin’ On Up?: Our Upwardly Mobile Economy Is a Myth
Blame the “New Economy” for Hindering Upward Mobility
Is the Value of Education Declining?
Chapter 3 - THERE IS NO FREE MARKET
Why the Free Market Works for Nikes but Not for Fire-Fighting
Living in a Libertarian Fantasy Land
There’s Nothing Free about the Free Market
The Veil Lifts, Exposing the Hypocrisy of the “Free Marketeers”
Chapter 4 - HOW COULD ANYONE BELIEVE THE BIG BANKS ARE
VICTIMS?
Fannie and Freddie: Tempted by Easy Profits
How Wall Street Turned Home Mortgages into Economic WMDs
Wall Street Rules
Were the Titans of Finance Really Too Big to Fail?
Chapter 5 - TAX CUTS AREN’T A SOLUTION TO EVERY PROBLEM
1. Shrink the Government and Drown It in a Bathtub
2. Conservatives’ Favorite Programs Don’t Count as Wasteful Spending
3. The Poor Don’t Pay Taxes
4. Tax Cuts for the Rich Will Also Help the Rest of Us
Government Is Always Big, Whether Republican or Democratic, but
Who Foots the Bill?
Abusing the Laffer Curve
The Reality: Undertaxation
The Gradual Collapse of America’s Infrastructure
No, Tax Cuts Don’t Always Generate Jobs and Prosperity
Chapter 6 - REPUBLICANS HAVE NEVER CARED ABOUT THE DEFICIT
Everyone Wants Big Government (at Least, the Parts They Like)
The Reality: Conservatives Spend Like Drunken Sailors
The Reality: There Is No Entitlement Crisis
The Real Crisis: Health Care
A Trillion Here, a Trillion There: Pretty Soon You’re Talking about Real
Money
The Gazillion-Dollar Fake Entitlement Crisis
Enter the Doomsayers
How More Government (of One Sort) Brings Greater Individual Liberty
and ...
Chapter 7 - AMERICA HAS NO RESPECT FOR FAMILY VALUES
The Myth of the Pipeline: Why Women Aren’t Poised to Shatter the
Glass Ceiling
Chapter 8 - OUR HEALTH-CARE SYSTEM IS A HUGE RIP-OFF
How Conservatives Framed the Debate
Americans Can’t Afford the Status Quo
So, What’s Wrong with Us?
How the Public Option Was Killed by “Big Health” and Its Conservative
Friends
Insurance Reform, Accomplished . . . Health-Care Reform, Not So Much
The Health-Care Economy
Chapter 9 - OBAMA IS NOT A SOCIALIST
What about Meddling in the Free Market of Ideas?
Call It Corruption: Unscrupulous Ties between Business and
Government
The Corporate Civil Rights Movement
Socialism or Corporatism: Which Is the Greater Threat?
Chapter 10 - GREEN JOBS ARE A GREAT IDEA
Why Do We Pick Up after Our Dogs?
A Calamity of Light Regulation
Screw Regulations! Bring On Private Enforcement!
The “Green-Collar Economy”: How Environmentalism Can Create Jobs
and Spur Growth
The Big Race to a Green Energy Economy
Why a Gallon of Gas Should Cost $10
Chapter 11 - THE EUROPEANS ARE ALL RIGHT
The Facts Beg to Differ
Keeping Score: Europe vs. the United States
The Incredible Shrinking Americans
Chapter 12 - “ILLEGAL” IMMIGRATION ISN’T HURTING YOUR
PROSPECTS
They’re Taking Our Jobs!
They’re Draining Public Services!
The Fallacies of Anti-Immigrant Data: “Hate Research” and the Borjas
Exception
They Just Need to Enforce the Laws!
The Utter Futility of “Enforcement Only”
Immigrants Take Jobs Americans Won’t Do!
Illegal Immigrants or Illegal Jobs?
Deflecting Illegal Immigration
The Real Costs of Stupid Immigration Laws
Chapter 13 - BLACKS STILL KEPT BACK
The Culture of Poverty
Racism Still Exists
The Lingering Effects of Institutionalized Racism
The African American Economy, Before and After the Crash
Chapter 14 - UNIONS STILL MATTER
Who Needs Unions?: The Artful Spin of the Right’s Propaganda
Machine
The Union Busters: Corporate America’s Weapon against Organized
Labor
Organized Workers Balance Corporate Power and Strengthen Our Labor
Markets
Will the Right Kill Labor’s Signature Legislation?
Whither the $20-an-Hour Wage?
Chapter 15 - THERE’S NOTHING FREE ABOUT FREE TRADE
“Free Trade” Is a Corporate Power Grab
What Is a Trade Barrier?
Democracy vs. “Free Trade”
The Hypocrisy of Free Traders
Corporate America Says You Can’t Have a Green Economy
Notes
Index

Copyright © 2010 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey Published simultaneously in Canada

Cartoon credits: page 20 © Tom Tomorrow; page 59 © Lloyd Dangle; page 158 © Matt Bors.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Holland, Joshua.
The fifteen biggest lies about the economy : and everything else the right doesn’t want you to know about
taxes, jobs, and corporate America / Joshua Holland.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-470-64392-1 (pbk.); ISBN 978-0-470-64392-1 (ebk); ISBN 978-0-470-91280-5 (ebk); ISBN
978-0-470-91282-9 (ebk)
1. United States—Economic policy—2009-2. United States—Economic conditions—2099-3. Rights and
left (Political science)—United States. 4. Conservatism—United States—History—21st century. I. Title.
HC106.84.H65 2010
330.973—dc22
2010028343

Acknowledgments

Without all of the support my family has given me over the years, I wouldn’t be
able to do a job I love. I’m deeply appreciative. I owe a special debt of gratitude
to my father, John Holland, who read the following chapters and offered me
spot-on feedback. Without his help, I doubt that this book would have been
possible.

I’m also grateful to Don Hazen, my boss at AlterNet, for giving me the chance
to work on this project, to Eric Nelson at Wiley for making it happen, and to
Wiley’s Rachel Meyers, whose “copyediting” turned out to be much more than
that.

Thanks also to Tom Tomorrow, Lloyd Dangle, and Matt Bors, for their razor-
sharp editorial cartoons, and to Larry Beinhart for the perfect excerpt to
accompany chapter 5.
INTRODUCTION

How our conventional wisdom fails us

Hope and change were in the air on that cold January day when Barack Obama
was sworn in as the nation’s first African American president. But there was also
a darker shadow looming. Our economy lay in ruins, and the American people
were mad as hell.

They had every reason to be. Unemployment was approaching 8 percent and
rising. They’d seen their retirement funds dry up and their home values tank.
They’d funded an enormous bailout of the banking industry, only to see Wall
Street’s movers and shakers earn fat bonuses just as they had in better times. The
wisdom of the pundits, the experts, and the prognosticators—the high priests of
the global economy—turned out to be woefully wrong. The nation’s elites had
been exposed as disastrously incompetent managers, yet their own positions of
comfortable privilege had, by and large, remained secure.

Everyone agreed that things were bad, but who was to blame? What exactly
had happened to our sense of economic security?

Since that day, many Americans, from across the political spectrum, have
gone from hopping mad to spitting mad. Progressives not only became
disenchanted with the GOP’s obstructionism, but also blamed the administration
for dropping the ball. Many felt that the hopey-changey promises that candidate
Obama had made on the stump had been abandoned. Some said that the
administration hadn’t really fought the good fight it had promised or hadn’t
fought it well.

But the really juicy anger was on the Right—the kind of dramatic, often over-
the-top anger the media love, complete with misspelled signs suggesting that the
new president was a “socialist” who hadn’t been born in this country. The “Tea
Parties” had arrived, and they captured the imagination of the chattering class