“Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.”

With all the mudslinging going on, it’s impossible for anyone, let alone the common voter, to track all the lies clogging the airways and the Internet. It is even more impossible to fully repudiate them. There are some lies from the McCain camp, though, that are so off the mark I feel compelled to address them.

In his current TV and radio commercials, McCain claims that Barack Obama “voted to raise taxes on people making just $42,000.” This claim is patently false, but it’s the kind of claim Republicans love to make because they know millions of voters, especially hardcore Republicans, already view all Democrats as tax-hikers. The only problem is the claim is both false and misleading in many respects:

1. The reference the ad makes to $42,000 is, in reality, a reference to Obama’s vote on a non-binding Democratic Senate budget resolution. This resolution was only a potential blueprint for future government revenues and spending and did not have a provision to raise anybody’s taxes.
2. Obama’s campaign tax plan says nothing about raising taxes on people who make $42,000. On the contrary, the campaign has released details showing that Obama is focusing any tax increase on the people who can most afford it, ones in the upper-income brackets. For instance, Obama’s plan proposes to raise the tax rates on capital gains and dividend income for people making more than $200,000, and increasing Social Security payroll taxes on earnings above $250,000 over the next decade. It is not hard to understand that the ones supporting ads portraying Obama as a “tax hiker” are those who fall into the income brackets that would be affected.
3. The McCain ads state that Obama will “Raise Taxes on the Middle Class.” Again, this is false. The actual Obama agenda promises a $1,000 tax cut for families that earn up to $150,000. This income range actually exceeds the middle class as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau.
4. Perhaps the TV ad’s most poignant scene takes place when it flashes an image of a mother reading to her two kids while the voiceover proclaims the lie of Obama’s plan to tax anyone who makes over $42,000 a year. This leaves the impression that a mother of two would have been one of the “people” affected by Obama’s purported vote to raise taxes on earners of $42,000, even though that vote would not have actually raised anyone’s taxes. But even under the terms of the non-binding Senate resolution, a mother of two would not have paid higher taxes unless she earned around $62,000, if she was single, or around $90,000, if she was married and filed jointly with her spouse.
5. The language of the non-binding Senate resolution would only have affected single taxpayers making $42,000 - and their tax increase would have amounted to all of $15 per year.

The McCain camp and GOP headquarters ads also claim that Obama has voted “94 times” for higher taxes. The truth is that of those 94 votes

• 53 were on budget measures that lacked the authority to raise taxes;
• 11 were in favor of raising taxes on people making $1 million or more in order to better fund veterans’ health care and child nutrition programs; and
• 23 were merely in opposition to new tax cuts proposed by Republicans, to keep taxes the same, not raise them.

After the election of 2004, no one should be surprised at the audacity of the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee and the Republican Party when it comes to using lies to smear the opposition. They have learned that most voters will not go to the effort to verify whether or not their statements are true, and they bank on their lies being accepted at face value. Since we are now without a viable, independent press, our society has succumbed to believing anything on television or on the Internet must be the Truth. John McCain and the Republican Party are counting on that herd mentality to allow the voting public to swallow the lies they are propagating and send McCain into the Whitehouse to rule over a third George Bush term.

When balancing the Democratic candidate against the Republican, consider that when the last Democratic President, Bill Clinton, left office, the U.S. Government had run an annual budget surplus of over $200 million for three years in a row. The Bush regime has run a budget deficit in excess of $200 million for each of the past six years, with two of those years (2003 and 2004) having a deficit in excess of $400 million.

And, please, check these facts.