Dr. Veronique De Rugy And the meaning of true lies
True Lies. Aside from being the title of an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie (rather apropos considering that such lies happen to be something republicans like Arnold specialize in), true lies are a political term referring to the use of incomplete, out-of-context facts or data with crucial omissions to mislead and misinform the public.
As senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, Dr. Veronique de Rugy is not only an expert in the fore mentioned methods, she has, as any good senior research fellow should, pioneered new ground in developing an altogether new form of true lying, presenting data and then drawing conclusions clearly not supported by the data presented. This new form of true lying depends on presenting complex data to support an erroneous or unsupportable conclusion in the hopes that those one is trying to mislead will be unable to understand the data, and simply assume it supports the conclusion the true liar presents it to support. And Dr. Veronique de Rugy certainly has motive to lie.
Since the conservative think tank, the Mercatus Center was founded by Rich Fink - an executive vice president at Koch Industries, former president of Koch Foundations and currently the president of the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, George Mason University has received more than thirty million dollars from the Koch brothers. Perhaps the good doctor says it best in her own words I work for the Mercatus Center and Charles Koch is the chairman of our board and one of our main donors. Also, I am a big fan of Richard Fink.
The Koch brothers as you may recall are the billionaire oil men who where among the biggest contributors to the election campaign of Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, and whose representatives are rumored to have worked behind the scenes to try and encourage a showdown with labor unions. Over the course of the last ten years the Koch brothers have donated $196 million dollars to conservative causes and the institutions that churn out right wing rhetoric, including Americans for Prosperity, FreedomWorks, and Citizens for a Sound Economy, the conservative groups responsible for the founding of the Tea Party. According to Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan watchdog group, The Kochs are on a whole different level. Theres no one else who has spent this much money. The sheer dimension of it is what sets them apart. They have a pattern of lawbreaking, political manipulation, and obfuscation. Ive been in Washington since Watergate, and Ive never seen anything like it. They are the Standard Oil of our times.
Given the source of the Mercatus Centers funding, to suggest that Dr. Veronique de Rugys research is biased by her political agenda is much like suggesting the earth is round, its a forgone conclusion and to suggest anything else is to prove oneself a fool.
In her essay entitled The Truth About Taxes and Redistribution, written for the Reason Foundation, an organization devoted to promoting conservative economic policies, Dr. de Rugy states As you can see [referring to bar graph], the top earning 1 percent of Americans (or 1.4 million returns making more than $380,000) paid 38 percent of federal personal income taxes. However, they made only 20 percent of income. This statement, along with the graphic it refers too are clearly intended to mislead the laymen into believing that the top one percent of earners pay more than their income in taxes, hence the statement paid 38 percent of federal personal income taxes. However, they made only 20 percent of income. The twenty percent figure is the percentage of all income earned in the U.S. by the top one percent of earners, so one percent of the population earned twenty percent (or one fifth) of all the money earned in the U.S. (down from twenty-three percent in 2007, the poor dears), the use of the word only in this sentence is clearly intended to downplay the significance of this figure. the thirty eight percent figure is the percentage of their individual income taxes that the top one percent of earners are supposed to pay. By placing these two figures together in graph, and referring to them as she has, Dr. de Rugy is trying to mislead the reader into mistakenly believing the top one percent are required to pay more in taxes than they earn. In reality the thirty eight percent tax would represent less than half their income, if they were required to even pay that.
Not represented in this graph or stated anywhere in this article is the fact the top one percent of earners dont actually pay thirty eight percent of their earnings in taxes, in fact most, if not all report their personal income as capital gains which are only taxed at a rate of fifthteen percent, and this is before a number of tax breaks they still receive. Dr de Rugy is plainly aware of this fact as she stated it herself, in the article The Truth About Taxes and Redistribution when she said There's lots of income mobility in and out of the "top 400" every year, and most of their income is due to highly fluctuating capital gains (which is taxed lower than ordinary income). Evidently doctor de Rugy is only aware of facts when they support the arguments she wishes to make, but rapidly becomes unaware of them when they fail to support another conclusion she wishes to draw.
This hardly the only example of the good doctor providing misleading data in order to draw questionable conclusions
In her article titled The Facts About the Corporate Income Tax, Dr de Rugy experiments with another, lesser known, form of true lying, presenting data that is completely irrelevant to the conclusions she uses said data to support.
Here doctor de Rugy attempts to prove that raising corporate tax rates will not result in increased revenue. To support this conclusion, Dr De Rugy presents a graph depicting corporate tax collection as a share of the economy side by side with the top marginal corporate rate since 1981. In this article, doctor de Rugy has clearly chosen highly complex data in hopes of confusing the laymen; however all she has actually done is demonstrate that revenue rises and falls as the economy weakens or strengthens. Since taxes are levied as a percentage of income, logic dictates that revenue will rise and fall as said income rises and falls, since corporate income is tied to the economy by a number of factors (such as consumer spending, the bond market, ect), one would expect revenue from corporate taxes to likewise be tied to the economy. Demonstrating the correlation between the general state of the economy and revenue received from corporate taxes does not prove that increasing corporate tax rates wont increase revenue, in fact the data presented is completely irrelevant to the conclusion drawn.
Last we come to the article The Facts About Stimulus Spending, here Dr. de Rugy actually presents data that contradicts the conclusion drawn.
Doctor de Rugy presents a graph in this article depicting the total stimulus money spent from January 2009 to may 2011 overlaying the number of new unemployment claims for the same period. Clearly stimulus spending is represented in this manner with the intention that it appear alarming, since the total money spent over time is represented rather than the rate over time. Because the rate of spending has remained steady, the total spent increases exponentially as a function of time, this may appear alarming to a laymen, or even be misinterpreted as an exponential increase in spending, but in fact only half of the total money allotted to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act had been spent when the data represented was correlated. Thought this is misdirection, it was not the contradiction I referred to earlier, however the graph is relevant to my next point.
The graph of new unemployment claims over time is significant in that the data (presented by the doctor herself) clearly shows that there is a notable drop in the rate of increase in unemployment beginning in June 2009, exactly four months after the economic stimulus spending began. Because it takes time for projects to be selected, designs to be approved, contractors to bid and so forth, this delayed response to the start of the economic stimulus spending is to be expected. The rate of unemployment then peaks in October 2009 before declining steadily until April 2011 when skyrocketing fuel prices caused a slight uptick in new unemployment claims. Although it failed to achieve the presidents goal of preventing unemployment from exceeding 8.8 percent, the data clearly shows that stimulus spending did have a direct, positive effect on unemployment rates.
In this article, Dr de Rugy states Based on this data, it is hard to make the case that doing more of the same will help. Yet that is precisely what New York Times columnist Paul Krugman think we should do. In his view, these dire results are due to a stimulus that was too small.
However, the data presented clearly shows that stimulus spending did have a positive effect on the job market and thereby had a positive effect on the economy as a whole. Not surprising considering that in this vary same article Dr de Rugy herself states that In theory, infrastructure spending injects more money into the economy than other types of government spending. In reality, however, politicians rarely include infrastructure spending in stimulus bills.
Regardless of whether or not politicians include infrastructure spending, the doctor admits that such infrastructure spending does have an impact and the data she has presented shows that the stimulus spending thus far has had just such a positive impact on the economy. Therefore it is reasonable to conclude that greater stimulus spending on infrastructure will have a greater positive impact, the data is in contradiction to the conclusion Dr de Rugy presented it to support.
These represent just a few examples of the shameless political bias and fundamental flaws contained in the research conducted by Dr de Rugy. One need only study the doctors writing with a critical eye to see that conservative political bias is her single driving motivation to such an extent that her every conclusion is derived solely to support conservative policies, regardless of the facts. Not surprising considering Dr de Rugys personal paycheck, as well as a considerable amount of academic notoriety as a senior research fellow, are afforded her, bought and paid for, by the Koch brothers.
Not only is Dr de Rugy the proverbial poster child for the total and complete lack of ethics in academia, but in journalism as well since she appears weekly on MSNBCs Bloomberg report where she is introduced only as a financial expert, with no mention of her ties to the Koch brothers or her shameless rightwing political bias. Two facts which viewers might find highly relevant in light of the fact that Dr de Rugys ties to the Koch brothers and her conservative political bias appear to be the sole basis for the conclusions she draws.
Quoted sources are listed in the order in which they appear.
An Interesting Interview - By Veronique de Rugy - The Corner - National Review Online
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/22/us/22koch.html?pagewanted=all
The Billionaire Koch Brothers’ War Against Obama : The New Yorker
Reason Foundation - The Truth About Taxes and Redistribution
The Truth About Taxes and Redistribution - Reason Magazine
The Facts About the Corporate Income Tax - Reason Magazine
The Facts About Stimulus Spending - Reason Magazine
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Clearly de Rugy is a paid spokesman for the Koch brothers who produces incredibly biased research with highly questionable conclusions. Shes like those doctors tobacco companies used to hire to go on T.V. and say smoking was perfectly safe. Using her as a source to justify your point is like quoting Stalin to justify fascism, its safe to say the speaker isnt impartial.
