Think Progress

No, Wisconsin’s Budget Deficit Wasn’t “Manufactured” by Walker and the GOP

by Hans Bader on February 23, 2011 · 2 comments

in Economy, Employment, Labor, Regulation

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Wisconsin is one of the most heavily taxed states in the country, and its government employees are paid much better than the state’s taxpayers. Like many states, it’s facing a substantial budget deficit. But when the state’s newly elected Republican governor, Scott Walker, attempted to place reasonable limits on government-employee pay and collective bargaining, liberal commentators such as Rachel Maddow falsely claimed that the state’s budget crisis was manufactured, and that Wisconsin actually had a projected budget surplus.

This claim has now been debunked by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, which endorsed Obama in 2008 and John Kerry in 2004: “Our conclusion: Maddow and the others are wrong. There is, indeed, a projected deficit that required attention, and Walker and GOP lawmakers did not create it.” Maddow blamed the state’s current deficit on business tax breaks supported by the governor, but those cuts are a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the state’s overall budget; and as the Journal-Sentinel noted, “the cuts are not even in effect yet, so they cannot be part of the current problem.”

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Inept Liberal Lobbyists Refute Their Own Claims: the bungling Center for American Progress

by Hans Bader on September 11, 2009 · 1 comment

in Politics as Usual, Precaution & Risk, Sanctimony

Many falsehoods were uttered by the President in his health care speech, as even liberal newspapers and Obama advisers have made clear. But the inept, George Soros-funded liberal lobbyists at the Center for American Progress (CAP) attempted to demonize ObamaCare’s critics anyway.

CAP recently shot itself in the foot by refuting its own claims in its September 11 “Progress Report.”

For example, it wrote that critics of big government and ObamaCare “include the Heartland Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, corporate front groups that claim smoking is good for you.”  But if you click on the very link for their false claim that CEI believes that “smoking is good for you,” it takes you to a CEI web page, www.controlabuseofpower.org, in which CEI not only makes no such claims, but does just the opposite, noting “the health risks of smoking” in the course of criticizing the $240 billion tobacco Master Settlement Agreement.

Indeed, the top post on that page, by CEI’s Ashley Jacobs, starts its last sentence about the tobacco settlement by explicitly “acknowledging the health risks of smoking.”

(The tobacco settlement has been defended in court by big tobacco companies that use it to squelch competition from smaller competitors, by forcing them to make costly escrow deposits on every cigarette they sell, under discriminatory laws states adopted as a condition of the settlement.  If CEI actually were a corporate front group, it would have defended the tobacco settlement, instead of attacking it, since its attack on the settlement dried up the small fraction of CEI’s funding that it once received from big tobacco companies).

There are many blog posts at OpenMarket saying that discriminatory regulation aimed at smokeless tobacco is bad precisely BECAUSE smoking kills, meaning that smokeless tobacco, which has far fewer health risks, should be allowed to trumpet its health-advantage over cigarettes so that smokers will stop smoking and switch to smokeless tobacco.  This public health benefit is, sadly, blocked by legislation backed by Philip Morris, the nation’s largest tobacco company, and, apparently, the Center for American Progress, which collects donations from corporations seeking to obtain corporate welfare and curry favor with the Obama Administration. (“Some open government groups, such as the Sunlight Foundation and the Campaign Legal Center, criticize the Center’s failure to disclose its contributors, particularly since it is so influential in appointments to the Obama administration,” as Politico has noted).

You can find three of my own blog posts discussing the dangers of smoking here, here, and here.

At the web sites of CEI and the Examiner, I have described cigarettes as “lethal” and “hazardous to your health” and written that “Every year, millions of smokers like my wife try and fail to quit . . . Many later die of smoking-related illnesses, which are caused by the smoke, not the nicotine.”