[img_assist|nid=22099|title=Paul Ryan|desc=Ryan's road to ruin|link=none|align=left|width=173|height=94]Despite all the heat he's been taking at his town hall meetings on his plan to gut Medicare and give wealthy Americans yet another tax break to "save" the federal budget, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Janesville) maintains a certain unflappability, which is enabled by his total willingness to mix facts with innuendo and outright falsehoods into a rhetorical mosh pit that takes the breath right out of genuine, thinking, concerned taxpayers.
A great source for all lies conservative is TooMuchOnline.org, which serves to deconstruct the hype and put the truth on display. TooMuch recently considered Ryan's performance and analyzed it to a T. Take this excerpt, for instance. After describing how Ryan disarmed one angry voter at a town hall who said the feds don't tax the wealthy enough, TooMuch continues:
For Ryan, a perfect sound bite. He touched, in a matter of seconds, all the bases that make up the case against raising taxes on the rich.
The wealthy, that case goes, already pay taxes aplenty. As hard-working — and mostly small — businesspeople, they can’t afford to pay more. And if you try to make them, they won’t be able to create jobs.
Make-believe “wonks” as smooth as Paul Ryan can make this stream of half-truths and misdirects seem almost plausible. But we can, if we slow the stream down, expose the folly — and greed — behind it.
Do we in the United States, for starters, already “tax the top,” as Ryan rushes to claim? Not at anywhere near the rates we once taxed it.
Taxpayers at America’s tippy top — the taxpayers who report the nation’s 400 highest incomes — have actually seen the share of their total income that they pay in federal income tax drop a stunning two-thirds, from 51.2 percent of their income in 1955 to 16.6 percent in 2007, the most recent year with stats.
Ryan is blurring the distinction between the top marginal income tax rate and a taxpayer’s overall tax liability on total income.How about Ryan’s claim that the President is proposing to up the tax rate on the affluent all the way up to “44.8 percent”? Not even close. Ryan here is blurring the distinction between the top “marginal” income tax rate and a taxpayer’s overall tax liability, from all federal taxes, on total income... .
Read the whole thing and keep it handy for the next time a conservative tries to tell you the rich are taxed too much in this country. It's here at:
http://toomuchonline.org/deconstructing-the-paul-ryan-sound-bite/