Like a Venus fly trap, Republican voters close their minds around false information as soon as they're fed it by Fox "news" and the rest of the RWS™. Thenceforward, it may as well be mummified and buried at sea. Ain't never gonna see the light of day again. Of all the things that drive me certifiably crazy, that's the worst. Because I can see no solution; and because democracy, in the world of reality, depends on well-informed voters. With the current iteration of Republicans, once the falsehoods are installed, there's simply no penetrating the carefully constructed wall of deliberate deception around them. And, depressing as it is to see people who have no information about what's really going on, what's indescribably worse is hearing about those who have absolutely wrong information, cling to it like electric charge on hair, and will never be put right. Here are a couple of charts that say a lot, loudly. (Even more loudly, if you click on them.)
The second one shows that Democrats aren't without misinformation either; but it's striking how different are the two parties, how far Rs wander from reality: taxes on the middle class have, in fact, gone down under President Obama. It's not statistical trickery, it's not a matter of opinion. It's straightforward, simple, and undeniable. (For the record, I think it'd have been much better to have spent more money on stimulus, and to have passed on the tax cut.) But it's the work of a deadly combination: desire to believe the worst about the black guy, and a constant stream of disinformation feeding the needing of preconditioned minds.I admit I haven't looked for the data behind chart #1; when you start graphing rate of change, I start thinking it could be fuzzy. But I do know stimulus spending has ended (probably too soon), and that deficit projections are looking better. It's also a fact that only under Democrats have deficits gone down, and that they've always gone up under Republicans, ever since Ronald Reagan and his voodoo economics. Even for fact-averse head-in-sanders, the Clinton era is not so long ago that its budget surplus -- and what happened to it when Bush took over -- is beyond recall. Is it?
R fiscal policy has never accomplished what it's claimed it would, namely budgetary balance without raising taxes while serving the needs of the country. Yet every single R candidate continues to make the same claim; and the budget plans that they've produced, on which they continue to campaign, have been shown to do exactly the opposite: increasing debt, cutting essential spending (except military, of course), and raising the tax burden on all but the highest earners). But they don't care, because they know they don't need to: their voters snap tight around the lies and suck them dry. No amount of honest information will change it. It's an intentionally rigged game, and since they're roughly half the voting population, in our democracy we're all the losers.
Added 3/16: I saw the following after the preceding was published:
