Before there was Anti-Trump Psychosis, before there was Bush Derangement Syndrome, it was Ronald Wilson Reagan who could be counted on to derail liberals from the semblance of reality they occasionally cling to.
The years since Reagan left the White House, and the country in far better shape than when he took office, have lessened the left's visceral loathing for a statesman who ended the Cold War without reeling off a shot, after American liberals for decades repeatedly apologized for the Evil Empire instead of seeing it for the mass-murdering monstrosity that it was.
More than a decade after his passing, the Gipper can still bring out the most absurd claims from liberals, as was the case for Thom Hartmann on his radio show earlier this week.
When he isn't spouting the Kremlin line on his RT (Russia Today) television show, along with fellow Manchurian anchors Ed Schultz and Larry King, Hartmann produces a three-hour radio show weekdays. It was here that Hartmann condemned Trump for complaining back in 2011 that half of Americans don't pay taxes. What made Hartmann's rant so amusing was that he was much more off the mark with a claim he made than Trump was with his --
HARTMANN: Well here's Donald Trump from 2011 when he wasn't running for president, this is five years ago, complaining about people apparently like himself who pay no taxes. Here he is --
FOX NEWS HOST STEVE DOOCY: When the president, Donald, says there has to be shared sacrifice, you know, there are a lot of people in this country, over half, don't even pay any federal taxes, so he's really talking about you. You're going to have to sacrifice more.
TRUMP: Well, I don't mind sacrificing for the country, to be honest with you, but you know, you do have a problem because half of the people don't pay any tax and he's talking about that, he's talking about people that aren't also working, that are not contributing to this society and it's a problem. But we have 50 percent, it just hit the 50 percent mark -- 50 percent of the people are paying no tax!
HARTMANN: Well, number one, Trump suggests that these people, you know, he must think half the country's on welfare. He doesn't realize that people working at low-wage jobs or part-time jobs maybe making below the poverty threshold and they're barely able to make it through and their income is not high enough that it starts being taxed, except that 100 percent of those people are paying payroll taxes on their income. A 100 percent of them are paying Social Security taxes, they're paying Medicare taxes, there's no escaping that, no matter how poor you are. If you get a wage, you know, those get deducted out of it, so they are paying federal taxes. They're just not paying federal income taxes, and apparently neither is Donald.
And if you employ workers, as does Trump by the thousands, you're obligated to pay half of their Social Security and Medicare taxes. It's more than a stretch to suggest that Trump, or any other business owner, would somehow be unaware of this. (But seeing how that the employer's contribution is simply taken from a worker's overall compensation, it is the employee carrying paying the full load anyway).
Then came this whopper of a claim from Hartmann --
HARTMANN: In another one of his tweets, (Trump writes) half of Americans don't pay income tax despite crippling government debt. Well, that's 'cause, you know, under Reaganomics half of Americans are living in poverty. This was not the case in 1979! It is the case now.
Only in Hartmann's feverish imagination. Not the case now, despite the ardor of his assurance, nor can it even be said of the Great Depression, when Franklin Roosevelt in his second inaugural saw "one third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished." By Hartmann's estimation, the United States is more poverty-stricken than Bolivia, Burkina Faso and Chad, though not as desperate as Guatemala, Haiti and Liberia.
And how about citing 1979 (!) as some sort of benchmark for post-war American prosperity. Hartmann, a boomer born in the early '50s, has forgotten how awful the economy was in 1979 -- double-digit inflation and mortgage rates, endless lines at gas stations, soaring gold prices, the country on the verge of its third recession in little more than a decade.
As for the poverty rate, it hovers around 14 percent -- where it stood in 1967, three years after Lyndon Johnson launched the War on Poverty -- despite taxpayers sinking $22 trillion in dozens of government programs over the last half-century to bring this conflict to an end. Worth noting is that in the decade and a half before LBJ's grandiose initiative, poverty nationwide was cut in half -- by a rising economic tide, not expanding the welfare state.
Most perverse about Hartmann's claim is that he gets it 180 degrees wrong -- far from consigning half of Americans to crushing deprivation, Reaganomics unleashed a 25-year economic boom, the greatest in history. How anyone can gush about the late '70s of economic malaise, and denigrate the Reagan-initiated boom years that lasted for a generation, defies comprehension.
Agreed -- Trump should be more specific and refer to roughly half of Americans not paying federal income taxes (what Romney meant by the "47 percent") and not "taxes", which surely extend way beyond what gets sent to the IRS. Along the same lines, Hartmann should refrain from stating as fact what he wishes had occurred as a result of Reagan's policies instead of what actually did.
