Top Tea Party Myths

·         Tea Party Myth #1: Healthcare Reform includes Death Panels that will Kill Your Grandmother

o   The Truth : This lie was based on a provision on end-of-life care, which was exactly what Republicans proposed under their Medicare reform plan of a few years ago.  After being called out, Republican lawmakers admitted that there was no such thing.

·        Tea Party Myth #2: President Obama is to Blame for our National Debt

o   The Truth: The vast majority of the debt came from Reagan and the Bushes. By the time he left office in 1989, Ronald Reagan more than equaled the entire debt burden produced by the previous 200 years of American history. George W. Bush a $4 trillion increase in the national debt, a staggering 71% jump.  And that didn’t include the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which he kept “off-budget” And the Tea Partiers want to go back to his policies!

·        Tea Party Myth #3:  The Government Ruins Health Care

o   The Truth: Americans pay more per person than the people of any other country, and have worse health outcomes.  We are the only advanced industrial democracy with uninsured people, and every other advanced democracy gets higher marks in customer satisfaction, patient outcomes and efficiency.  Nixon set up the current HMO system on the recommendation of Erlichmann and Kaiser, who assured him that HMOs could profit because “all the incentives run toward less care”.

o   The Truth: A 2007 Commonwealth Fund report, “Aiming Higher: Results from a State Scorecard on Health System Performance,” examined states’ performance across 32 indicators of health care access, quality, outcomes and hospital use. Topping the list were Hawaii, Iowa, New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine. Bringing up the rear were the Bush bastions of Kentucky, Louisiana, Nevada, Arkansas, Texas, with Mississippi and Oklahoma. The 10 worst performing states were all solidly Republican in 2004. (8 voted for McCain in 2008.)  The more Republican the state, the worse the healthcare system.

o   Tea Party Myth #3.1 – Obama will move your grandma off Medicare onto a government-run program

§  The Truth:  Medicare IS a government run, single-payer system.  It gets better customer satisfaction ratings and runs on lower administrative and overhead costs than any private insurer.

·        Tea Party Myth #4: President Obama is not an American Citizen

o   The Truth: They keep asking “why won’t he show the birth certificate?”  Well, he has.  It has been inspected by President Bush’s Justice Department, the government of the State of Hawaii, state and federal courts, several non-partisan fact-checking organizations, and several media outlets.  There were also birth announcements in two Hawaii newspapers at the time of his birth.  The Judge who heard the lawsuit called it “frivolous”.  There is no factual basis to questions about the President’s citizenship.

·        Tea Party Myth #5: President Obama Has Raised Taxes.

o   The Truth: Barack Obama in the stimulus package delivered on his pledge of tax relief for 95% of American households.  No one has had a tax increase yet, though those making over $250,000 per year will likely see their taxes raised to the same level they were during the longest sustained economic boom in American history.

·        Tea Party Myth #6: President Obama is a Muslim

o   The Truth: Most of his lifetime of church attendance, constant references to his Christian faith, criticism from secular humanists for his continuation of faith-based initiatives and religious advisors are all irrelevant to Tea Partiers because during an exhausting campaign he slipped up once saying “my Muslim faith”, when being asked about accusations of being Muslim.  Apparently the preponderance of evidence can’t overcome religious ignorance.

·        Tea Party Myth #6 – The Economic Stimulus Had No Effect

o   The Truth: Earlier this month, the reliably Republican Wall Street Journal agreed the Obama administration has helped stem the bleeding from the Bush Recession:

“Many forecasters say stimulus spending is adding two to three percentage points to economic growth in the second and third quarters, when measured at an annual rate. The impact in the second quarter, calculated by analyzing how the extra funds flowing into the economy boost consumption, investment and spending, helped slow the rate of decline and will lay the groundwork for positive growth in the third quarter — something that seemed almost implausible just a few months ago. Some economists say the 1% contraction in the second quarter would have been far worse, possibly as much as 3.2%, if not for the stimulus.

For the third quarter, economists at Goldman Sachs & Co. predict the U.S. economy will grow by 3.3%. “Without that extra stimulus, we would be somewhere around zero,” said Jan Hatzius, chief U.S. economist for Goldman.”

o   In addition, two Nobel-Prize winning economists say the problem with the stimulus was that the President didn’t spend enough.

TO MAKE A LONG STORY SHORT: A MOVEMENT BASED ON MYTHS IS NOT A MOVEMENT YOU CAN TRUST!