Steve Benen’s post concerning the tendency of the GOP to deny reality is dispiriting:
Up until recently, this analysis was publicly available through the Treasury. As the Wall Street Journal reported overnight, that analysis has now vanished – because it “contradicts Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s argument that workers would benefit the most from a corporate income tax cut.”
The paper was available on the Treasury website during the summer, and it wasn’t clear when it was removed or whether Treasury intended to publish a new analysis. Other technical papers from 2008 through 2016 remain on its site, along with working papers dating back to 1974.
For Mnuchin, it’s critical that people believe that a corporate tax break would benefit workers, which makes all of the evidence to the contrary quite inconvenient.
But that’s just today. What about yesteryear?
If this sounds vaguely familiar, it’s probably because the Bush/Cheney administration developed a reputation for pulling a similar trick.
In 2005, for example, after a government report showed an increase in terrorism around the world, the administration stopped publishing annual data on international terrorism. When the Bush administration was discouraged by data about factory closings, the administration announced (on Christmas Eve) it would stop publishing information about factory closings. When Bush’s Department of Education found that charter schools were underperforming, the administration sharply cut back on the information it collected about charter schools.
The small blob on the left is Ganymede. In case you’re wondering, yes, Ganymede whirls around Jupiter, like our Moon whirls around the Earth.
Image Credit & Copyright: Damian Peach/SEN
Maybe it’s just the engineer in me, but this unwillingness to face up to reality, in fact to disregard reality, is really disturbing to me. How can they expect to achieve what they promise if they refuse to take reality into account? It’s like trying to account for the motions of Ganymede without taking into account the enormous gravity of Jupiter!
So long as the GOP persists in believing its own ideology rather than the reality dug up by the experts, its attempts to accomplish its promises will fail – and unlike in the past, where they might be excused with ‘good try’ and all that – although that didn’t happen in 2008 after the start of the Great Recession – this time around their contempt for experts, so glowingly displayed by Trump and the Congressional GOP, should be remembered and held against them.
The Great Faker, I expect, will be done in by Fake News, both that of the real news organizations, as well as his own lies.
