When running for president, Barack Obama made many promises to the American people. Some of these promises he has made good on. For instance, he promised he’d close Club G’tmo and make those poor innocent terrorists love us. Sure enough, terrorists are beginning to be released and might even get constitutional protections originally intended to be afforded to American citizens.
Candidate Obama also promised he’d “restore America’s moral standing,” which was supposedly spoiled by George W. Bush (and, well, basically any president before O himself). Sure enough, in the past six months in office apologizing to the world for how much America sucks. Granted, the world’s vision of us has not improved much just ask the Iranian mullahs and Osama bin Laden: they all have declared that Obama is no different than Bush), but he’s at least kept his promise.
Yet another promise made by Obama during the campaign was to reduce nuclear weaponry, focusing on and starting with our own. (Indeed, just this week we learn from the NY Times of all places that as a college student radical in the early 80’s Obama dreamed not only of a nuclear free United States but a military-free one as well. Surprise!) Within the past six months he has kept promise, starting from demonstrating complete eunuch-like capitulation in the face of the fast-growing nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea. And of course, just this past week Obama was in Russia negotiating a nuclear arms-reduction deal, which was apparently music to the ears of Putin and Medvedev.
But not all promises made by Obama were able—or should I say not intended—to be kept, namely the promise to not increase taxes on individuals making less than $200,000 and couples making less than $250,000. The McCain campaign and other Republicans, not to mention economics keeping a tally of the programs Obama was promising and the tax dollars it would cost, called this promise a load of bull. But no fear, Obama team, several reporters from the Associated Press printed a number of “Fact Check” articles, in which Obama’s critics’ claims were dismissed as lies, myths, and exaggerations.
Unfortunately, and not surprisingly to anyone opposing Obama, his promise has already been broken, and AP has the nerve to act surprised. James Taranto at WSJ’s Opinion Journal writes about it today in detail:
Fact Check: Cardinals to Win Super Bowl
What if the AP covered sports the way it covers politics?
By JAMES TARANTO
If President Obama has his way, you will soon have to submit to government rationing of medical care and drive a tiny car. But at least your taxes won’t go up if you make under $250,000 a year, right?
Oh, you poor naive soul. The Associated Press delivers the bad news in a dispatch by Stephen Ohlemacher titled “PROMISES, PROMISES: Obama’s Tax Pledge Unrealistic”:
Obama made a firm tax pledge during the presidential campaign, repeating it numerous times in the weeks and months leading up to Election Day: no tax increases for individuals making less than $200,000 a year or couples making less than $250,000.
“Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes,” Obama told a crowd in Dover, N.H., last year.
But less than a month after taking office, Obama signed an expansion of child health care financed by 62-cent tax increase on each pack of cigarettes.
Obama also signed an anti-smoking bill in June that grants authority to the Food and Drug Administration to regulate tobacco. To pay for the new program, a fee is being imposed on the industry—and presumably passed on to consumers—estimated to generate more than $5 billion over the next decade.
While not directly increasing taxes, a House-passed version of Obama’s plan to reduce greenhouse gases blamed for causing global warming would similarly increase American families’ home energy bills by $175 a year on average, according to the Congressional Budget Office. [Because this is not a direct tax increase, but merely a policy causing an increase in your bills, my Obama-worshiping liberal friends would probably circle the wagons and excuse this.]
Obama hasn’t offered a detailed plan to fix health care, though his aides are working with lawmakers as they craft proposals. Obama included only a down payment for health care reform in the budget proposal he unveiled this spring.
He proposed limiting itemized tax deductions for individuals making more than $200,000 and couples making more than $250,000. The plan, which faces stiff opposition in Congress, would limit deductions for mortgage insurance, state and local taxes and charitable contributions, raising about $270 billion over the next decade.
Obama also proposed a series of business tax increases and accounting changes that would raise an additional $30 billion.
If only someone had warned us back when Obama was running for president! Well, actually, John McCain and the Republicans did issue such warnings—but the AP, in a series of “fact check” articles, declared that the warnings were false and implied that they were lies.
On Sept. 2, the AP’s Jim Kuhnhenn filed a dispatch from the GOP convention titled “Fact Check: Checking the GOP’s Speakers”:
FORMER SEN. FRED THOMPSON, R-TENN.: “Now our opponents tell you not to worry about their tax increases. They tell you they are not going to tax your family. No, they’re just going to tax ‘businesses’! So unless you buy something from a ‘business,’ like groceries or clothes or gasoline, or unless you get a paycheck from a big or a small ‘business,’ don’t worry, it’s not going to affect you.”
THE FACTS: Obama would raise income taxes on the wealthiest and their capital gains and dividends taxes. He would raise payroll taxes on wealthiest by applying it to the portion of income over $250,000 and he would also raise corporate taxes. Only small businesses that make more than $250,000 a year would see taxes rise. Obama would provide $80 billion in tax breaks mainly for poor workers and the elderly, including tripling the Earned Income Tax Credit for minimum-wage workers and higher credits for larger families. The Tax Policy Center, a think tank run jointly by the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, concluded that Obama’s plan would increase after-tax income for middle-income taxpayers by about 5 percent by 2012, or nearly $2,200 annually.
An Oct. 27 offering from the AP’s Beth Fouhy was headlined “FACT CHECK: McCain Persists in Exaggerations”:
McCain also accuses Obama of aiming to raise taxes on small businesses, which he says would cause them to cut jobs. He has recently fleshed out that point by invoking “Joe the Plumber,” who told Obama on a campaign stop in Ohio that he wants to buy the plumbing business where he works, but is afraid Obama’s tax plan would make that impossible.
In fact, Obama would raise taxes on small businesses making more than $250,000, but only about two percent of small businesses in the country fall into that category. And Obama is also proposing targeted tax relief for small businesses, such as a tax credit for offering health care to employees and elimination of capital gains taxes on startup businesses.
And on Nov. 3, 2008, the AP’s Calvin Woodward summed things up disapprovingly: “Altogether, facts took a beating in the campaign. … When a non-licensed plumber who owes back taxes and would get a tax cut under Obama is held out by McCain as a stand-in for average working people who should vote Republican, you know truth-telling took a back seat to myth-making.”
In truth, facts took a beating in the AP’s campaign coverage because the wire service, in embracing an opinionated style of reporting it calls “accountability journalism,” mired itself in epistemological confusion.
The statements that Thompson, McCain and Joe the Plumber made, and that the AP claimed to refute, were not factual claims at all. They were predictions. We now have sufficient facts, as reported by Ohlemacher above, to conclude that those predictions were accurate. But an accurate prediction (“the Steelers will win the Super Bowl”) is quite different from an accurate statement of fact (“the Steelers won the Super Bowl”). If you don’t grasp the distinction, try going to Vegas and placing a bet on the Steelers to win Super Bowl XLIII.
So the AP repeatedly made a cognitive error in treating as-yet-untested predictions as if they were statements of fact. Even more ludicrous, however, is the basis on which the AP concluded that the GOP statements were false. It treated Obama’s campaign promise as if it were not only a statement of fact but an incontrovertible one.
A promise is a statement of intent, not a fact. Sometimes people are unable to do what they intend because of circumstances beyond their control. Giving Obama the benefit of the doubt—assuming that he sincerely intended not to raise taxes on people making under $250,000, and that circumstances made it impossible to do otherwise—it’s as if the AP had done a pre-Super Bowl “fact check” along these lines:
CLAIM: The Pittsburgh Steelers are favored to win.
THE FACTS: Arizona Cardinals coach Ken Whisenhunt has made clear that “our guys are ready to play” and that they intend to be victorious.
But the AP’s campaign coverage was worse than this. Politicians sometimes make promises in bad faith—surely more often than American pro sports teams throw games. By treating Obama’s campaign pledge as if it were an established fact, the AP displayed either a staggering naiveté or an appalling pro-Obama partisanship.
I think Taranto hits the nail on the head: Obama’s promises—what he would do if elected—was treated as fact—what will actually happen. Whether the writers for AP were deliberately or unwittingly blurring the distinction between the two or not, it’s too late. Obama’s been elected, and like his opponents in the McCain campaign and elsewhere said, all our taxes are going to be going up.
And that’s a fact!
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