JUST THE FACTS, M'AM....

As I have read various guest editorials and letters to the editor published in The Albany Herald in recent years, I've wondered what purpose is gained by the Herald's penchant for regularly printing assertions of fact which are demonstrably false. On a page which is supposed to be devoted to opinions, is it too much to ask that the Herald maintain a modicum of integrity with regard to the facts on which those opinions are based? As the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but everyone is not entitled to his own facts.

The recent guest commentary of a Saxby Chambliss Fair Tax supporter is a typical example. The Chambliss acolyte no doubt believes his "facts:" "China backs our dollar, which depreciates the value of the dollar" (any foreign country buying our dollars will cause the value of the dollar to appreciate in value, not depreciate); China is a "socialist country" (while technically true in that in China the government owns the means of production, is misused in the context of the article to make it a pejorative assertion; he is apparently unaware that many Western democracies which embrace freedom as much as Americans profess to do are economically close to a Socialist model-- he probably meant to say that China is a totalitarian Communist dictatorship); "Big Government, with its wasteful spending and higher taxation, has killed off our small businesses" (the U.S. Census Bureau reported that in 2005 there were just under six million small businesses, defined as having from one to 500 employees, which employed just over 116 million people with an annual payroll of over 4.5 trillion dollars; if one includes in the total all non-employee small businesses, there were 26 million).

But the one assertion that caught my eye was the contention that if China calls in its loans from the United States Government, it could somehow "take control of our assets," including "stocks in our military" and "stocks in our resources like oil, natural gas, etc." I must confess, I was unaware that there was a stock market in which one might purchase shares of our military (the Army is down 2 1/2 points today, while the Marines are up 3 points on a volume of two million shares exchanged) or our government owned natural resources (much as the oil companies wish it were so, and perhaps it was closest to that model during the Bush Administration when everything appeared to be for sale, including public lands to developers and the opportunity of Jack Abramoff's clients to receive government contracts and write the laws regulating their industries).

The author also asserts, without a single source cited, that "World economists have proven and examined Fair Tax policies, claiming it [sic] would solve our current problem with the economy." As many problems that our current economy has, including lack of credit fluidity, poor investments by large financial institutions, large car makers running their companies into the ground, spiraling health care costs, and so forth, I have never seen an assertion by any economist that having an income tax instead of a 23% national sales tax was a root cause (or replacing the latter with the former a potential solution) of our recent economic travails.

As I write this, the election run-off hasn't been decided yet. But any voter who went to the polls assuming that a vote for Saxby Chambliss is a vote that will cause the income tax system to be replaced by a national sales tax has failed to address a political reality: if Saxby Chambliss couldn't even get a recorded vote on a Fair Tax bill during the 12 years he was in a Republican controlled Congress (8 years in a GOP controlled House, four in a GOP controlled Senate, until the 2006 election), with six of those years under a Republican President, then there is zero chance that he will get such a bill to a floor vote with a Democratic Senate and a Democratic President setting the agenda. And to be both consistent and accurate, that is my opinion, not a "fact."