NotSo! — and a new request

On Wednesday I posted the highlight reel from my BloggingHeadsTV debate with David Frum, noting that the trouble with our conservative friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn't so. I then asked you intrepid readers to respond with your own favorite conservative NotSo's: oft-repeated conservative clichés that in fact are patently false.

Your response was spectacular. Over 75 comments.

Daniel Brin:

"Jimmy Carter cut the military budget." Actually, he increased the military budget beyond the rate of inflation. This followed several years of post-Vietnam budget cuts in the Nixon and Ford administrations. Reagan just accelerated what Carter already started.

"Jimmy Carter gave us double-digit inflation and interest rates." Actually, these syndromes began during the Nixon and Ford administrations that preceded Carter. Nixon tried wage-and-price controls. Ford tried "WIN" buttons. Carter did the only thing that worked by nominating Paul Volcker to chair the Federal Reserve. Volcker choked the money supply so severely that the economy fell into a near-depression, but by God, it killed inflation and let the economy reboot under Reagan. Carter's act of political suicide made Reagan a hero.

Dan Ancona likes the one about how "tax cuts create jobs."

Tax cuts don't create jobs, people do. If you relentlessly cut taxes, starve the schools and limit the opportunities kids have... no, my poor confused conservative pals, that is not good for the economy.

The peerless Digby says of the class, "Reagan proved lowering taxes raises revenues":

The fact is that Reagan signed one of the largest tax increases in history and even then by the time Reagan left office, a combination of lower tax revenues and sharply higher spending for defense had created the biggest budget deficit in history.

Steven Kyle debunks the myth that Reagan was more popular than Clinton with this chart. Joe Smith says you don't even need a link to bunk the NotSo that the stock market soars when Republicans are in office; "Anyone who can hold a graph right side up can prove that one false." Scott Bowles is sick of hearing that "America has the finest healthcare system in world." Yes: unless "you go by life expectancy. Or infant-mortality rate. I guess we're at the top in terms of percentage of GDP spent on healthcare, but that's hardly a measure of how good the system is, just how much it costs. Tom Geraghty gives us a Google search for the chestnut that Democrats are anti-business, then links to this stunning table comparing average economic performance under Republican and Democratic presidents: GDP growth between 1930 for instance, 5.4 percent in Democratic administrations and 1.6 under Republicans.

It goes on and on. Read them yourself. I love it!

And now to my request. It's for a bit of community building, and a bit of solidarity in defeating the full-time professional bullshitters of the conservative movement. There are several new utterances of the NotSo! description every day, of course. I'd like Big Con readers to keep an eye out for ones they hear, and record them in the comments to this post. Ideally, I'd like to get enough so that by every Friday I can list three or four for readers to vote on—the coveted Big Con Of The Week!™ Leave your own nominations in the comments, or email me directly at rperlstein@ourfuture.org.

Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines...

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