Fox host Charles Payne set the stage for justifying GOP obstruction of President Biden’s American Jobs Plan by “asking” in his opening, “Do we need nearly $3 trillion in new spending?”
“You’re pretty passionate on this topic today,” was Payne’s introduction to Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX). Payne acknowledged there’s a need to improve infrastructure but, he added, “It seems like it’s being used as an excuse or trojan horse for a lot of excess spending.”
Brady got right to it. Ignoring how the jobs bill would create millions of jobs for Americans, he complained it is “packed full of wasteful spending, radical Green New Deal and just lavish green subsidies for millionaire owners of wind farms and the wealthy to buy electric vehicles. This is not the way to go. The tax increases he’s insisting upon actually wipes out any economic gain from the bill. In fact, America is a net loser economically from infrastructure. That should never happen.”
FACT CHECK: Calling the bill the “Green New Deal” is a misleading Republican talking point that was rated “mostly false” by PolitiFact.
But Payne let it go. Instead, he pushed for more demonization: “You say [the bill] involves crippling taxes, and it sabotages the job recovery. I want to go there, the notion that this action would hurt this strong, V-shaped recovery that we were enjoying even long before this year began.”
Brady, of course, complied. “I think the policies in the Biden administration are already hurting our economy,” he began. “We saw this in the April jobs report. If anyone tells you these generous federal unemployment benefits aren’t making it harder for mainstream businesses to hire they’re kidding themselves.”
The tax increases “don’t land on corporations,” Brady claimed, “they land on the workers, on the families whose retirement depends upon these corporations, on the communities where these companies are at.” He also predicted “a second wave of American companies moving overseas and taking their workers and their manufacturing with them.”
“Yeah,” Payne agreed.
FACT CHECK: Biden’s first GDP quarter showed 6.4% growth. That's not exactly “hurting our economy.”
Furthermore, Brady is the same guy who pushed through a $1.7 trillion tax cut that “ballooned the deficit” and “slashed taxes for corporations.”
You can watch Brady and Payne grope for rationales to obstruct the American Jobs Plan below, from the May 19, 2021 Your World.
If he’s complaining about the top individual tax rate (for people earning above 420K) going back to 39.6%, that’s a far far cry from when the rate was 71% for people earning over 120K – which was where the rate sat in 1982, when Ronald Reagan was supposedly in charge of what the GOP wants everyone to think was “the greatest economy ever”. And at that time, the book rate for corporations was 46%. Yet Brady would try to scam everyone that significantly lower tax rates will somehow kill the economy.
If he’s complaining about any tax rate increasing, or any loopholes or deductions being reduced, he can explain why he did exactly that to Middle Class Employees, resulting in tens of millions of Americans seeing massive increases in their federal tax bills. But he’s not about to do that.
And this entire act from him and Payne is nothing but further gaslighting to try to talk the economy down and help the GOP win back some seats next year. The act should look familiar – we saw nearly the same playbook during President Obama’s first two years, where Fox News and the GOP went from insisting that nothing was wrong with the economy during W’s massive recession to suddenly deciding the economy had gone off a cliff the second that President Obama was sworn in. It used to be that these guys hoped you would not remember history from 30 years ago. Now they’re hoping you won’t remember things that happened yesterday.
Even by their own measures, especially the stock market, the Biden administration is doing pretty well. They must think their viewers are stupid. …. Oh wait.
