Crossposted from SmokeyMonkey.org.
I don't often write much any more as there are plenty of others saying what I want said. Should they not be heard, I will add my voice. However, I do not feel I need to write about torture or Arlen Specter or the latest crisis in Africa when others are doing so adequately. I do need to write about individual experiences that can't be expressed by others.
Such is my tale of a recent conversation with one of my republican friends. He is a well-informed atheist, and we have had many a pleasant conversation about history and classical music. Today, I braved the political debate. It was one of those meandering political debates that touch on every topic because most end at "so we disagree about that".
It went well, and I would simply like to record some of the fallacies I heard and correct them with source information. Details below.
Taxes
Current upper bracket tax rates are immoral, says my client/friend. He claimed the current top marginal rate is 35% and Obama wants to increase it to 40%. With the addition of other taxes (property, sales, et cetera), he claimed an impact of 67% (two-thirds).
He is correct about the current rate, and Obama would allow the Bush tax cuts of 2003 for the wealthiest to expire. This would return the top marginal rate to 39.6%, if I am reading The Tax Foundation report correctly. The last time this "immoral" rate was used was during the Clinton administration (1993 saw the top rate rise from 31% to 39.6%).
To me, this is a non-issue, and, in fact, I believe it is for my debate opponent as well. This would be a 95% safe belief. He, also, made the point that everyone should pay some tax. There may be a finer point to make about effective tax rates (after credits and deductions and such), as that is the only way to reconcile the belief that some people don't pay taxes and some people pay 67% taxes. I would suspect that both cases are vastly overstated.
Oh, yeah, I should mention that my client is an accountant and told me not to question him on taxes because he knows taxes. No dispute there.
Timothy McVeigh
I'm not sure why republicans feel the need to defend the extremists of their ideology, but they will do every time. I was asked point blank whether I feared rightwing neo-nazi domestic terrorists more than I fear foreign islamic terrorists. Based on a recent article I wrote on Domestic Terrorism and Rightwing Extremism, I responded correctly that I was more concerned about terrorists in this country than the nutjobs in other countries. He, then, proceeded to claim, as if informing a child, that there haven't been any domestic terrorists since McVeigh's bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City. And McVeigh, he said, was an anarchist. My debate opponent directly denied that McVeigh was part of a rightwing, neo-nazi, rascist militia movement.
Google the following: "timothy mcveigh militia". The first link is a profile of McVeigh from the BBC.
He began collecting guns while still at school and after he left devoured right-wing, pro-militia magazines like Solider of Fortune and Spotlight. [...] An even stronger influence was The Turner Diaries, a racist, anti-Semitic novel which tells the story of a gun enthusiast who reacts against tighter gun laws and starts a revolution by packing a van with home made explosives and blowing up the FBI headquarters in Washington.
The Turner Diaries continues to cause more domestic violence than any Osama bin Laden video or extremist fatwa ever will. See Richard Poplawski for real and very recent evidence of this continued threat to the very fabric of our society, taking place here, in our supermarkets and neighborhoods.
Fannie and Freddie
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac caused the global recession because they were buying subprime loans and credit default swaps.
This has been debunked many times. Paul Krugman, from June of 2008, is the best.
[T]hey [Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac] didn’t do any subprime lending, because they can’t: the definition of a subprime loan is precisely a loan that doesn’t meet the requirement, imposed by law, that Fannie and Freddie buy only mortgages issued to borrowers who made substantial down payments and carefully documented their income.
Education
I may not be recalling this correctly, but if I am, this is a clear case of direct and blatant misinformation making into a debate as a fact. My opponent asked me about my biggest priorities and I responded, "education". He then made the claim that spending money on education is not effective, as evidenced by the DC school district. He claimed that DC spends the most per capita of any state in the nation and gets the worst results.
Actually, the District of Columbia is 14th in per capita spending, but it does indeed have the worst assessment scores in the nation in all areas, according to Statemaster.com, an online database of publicly available statistics in a nice searchable format.
You can't always have debate materials handy, but I knew this was bogus when I heard it. In fact, looking at the numbers, there appears to be a pretty obvious correlation between higher per capita spending and more proficient assessments as well as between lower spending and lower assessments, the DC example aside. I am not suggesting throwing money at the problem; I'm suggesting we throw money at the teachers.
I was told in response to this that the California teachers' unions were actually making the problem worse by raising their incomes and living standards. Such is the thinking of a republican.
Summary
Epistemically, republicans are almost always wrong. Discussion of facts is often useless. Disparaging their sources is pointless. However, when arguing with a fellow atheist and avid reader of history, I expect a certain epistemic and historiographic common ground. I found today that politics, at least for republicans, cannot be informed by reality.