One of the craftier bits of rightwing dissimulation (most of their lying is of course not crafty, but as crude as two dogs doing it in the middle of the road) involves trying to turn a political figure of the left into a supporter of rightwing policies. Perhaps the most infamous version of this is their perversion of MLK's "I have a dream" speech into an attack on affirmative action.
Running at #2 is the attempt by supply side righties to invoke JFK as someone who would support the insane economic policy of George W. Bush.
During the convention, Larry Kudlow interviewed Austan Goolsbee, U of Chicago economist and Obama economic adviser, about the Obama economic plan. Kudlow, of course, is a supporter of the catastrophic economic policies of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush--i.e., drop marginal rates as close to zero as possible in the faith that this grows not only the pocketbooks of the rich (which it undeniably does) but the economy more generally.
In the course of the rather brief interview, Kudlow not only invoked 'research' on the Obama plan that Goolsbee quickly demonstrated had not even understood what the plan is:
Kudlow: ...Austan, on the basic incentive model, if you’re raising tax rates on successful earners, and I think one of the Tax Policy center people said $165,000 dollars and up for singles, aren’t you essentially removing money from the private sector, giving it over to the government, and letting the government direct the economy...
Goolsbee: Nooo...
Kudlow: And isn’t this the quicksand...
Goolsbee: Noo. Nooo. Noooo!
Kudlow: ...that we found ourselves in the seventies Austan?
Goolsbee: Noo. Noo. We’re talking about for couples making more than $250,000 a year, singles making more than $200, that the rates would go back, at most, to what they were in the nineties. And for a lot of the rates, to significantly less than what they were in the nineties. There was no evidence that that sent us into an economic tailspin in the nineties. And there’s no suggestion that it would today.
he also tried the tired old Republican move of invoking JFK as essentially George W. Bush circa 1960:
Kudlow: ...one of my favorite quotes, from one of my favorite supply-siders. His name is John F. Kennedy. And here’s what he said...
Goolsbee: Okay.
Kudlow: ...I believe in 1962. "In short, it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low, and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now. The purpose of cutting taxes now is not to incur a budget deficit but to achieve the more prosperous, expanding economy, which can bring a budget surplus." Austan Goolsbee...
Goolsbee: And I totally agree with it.
Kudlow: I know you do, but I say your man is not being true to JFK.
Now, this kind of nonsense passes all the time in the mainstream media without contestation. Goolsbee, bless him, brought the hammer down immediately on Kudlow's attempted big lie:
Goolsbee: No, you forgot, you forgot to mention that the marginal rate was 91 percent when he said that. We absolutely would cut the rate if it was anything like that...
Kudlow: How high would you go?
Goolsbee: ...all we’re talking about is rates going back to the...
Kudlow: How high would you go?
Goolsbee: 39.6
Kudlow: Because some people say, when you include the proposal to raise Social Security and payroll tax, for these [inaudible]...
Goolsbee: That’s not until 2019.
Kudlow: ...you’re gonna run it up to 50 or 60 percent on the marginal tax rate.
Goolsbee: Noo. Nooo. Noo. That’s not until 2019 at the earliest. The top marginal rate would be 39.6. People making less than $150,000 would get a substantial tax cut. And everyone below $250 would not see any rates go up.
This is CLASSIC rightwing supply sider dissimulation. "OHMIGOD, the Dems are going to MASSIVELY increase taxes on the wealthy and thereby DESTROY THE ECONOMY!!!!!" All the relevant specifics and nuances disappear in this 'argument.' Goolsbee puts the nuances back in. JFK was a confirmed believer that marginal rate cuts would be beneficial to the economy overall precisely because they were so high at the time he proposed this move. Since then, the Republicans have chopped those rates down to the point of crippling the federal government's ability to do much of the work most Americans would like it to do (and this is precisely their intention, of course). The Obama economic plan, despite what the rightwingers claim 24/7 on cable TV, AM radio, and the Internet, involves returning the marginal tax rates to where they were in the 1990s. It is not a socialist revolution by any stretch of the imagination. It is simply the economic good sense, undergirded by research done by top economists like Professor Goolsbee himself, that punches a gaping hole in the rightwing supply sider claim that marginal rates can never be too low:
Kudlow: Austan Goolsbee, do you believe in the supply-side model?
Goolsbee: Which part of it? I believe the supply-side is important. But I do not believe that by cutting rates, when the rates are as low as they are now, that you would generate revenue. No.
The reality underlying all this? Kudlow and friends are not really interested in the well-being of the economy as a whole, however much they know they need to invoke it a lot for their non-wealthy viewers. They are interested in the incomes of the wealthy. Period. End of sentence.
Put Goolsbee's correction of Kudlow's attempted lie in your tool kit, for later use when you hear some other rightwing elitist who is pretending to be a populist invoke JFK in this way. I promise you, it will happen.
entire transcript of Kudlow interview with Goolsbee