Pushing misinformation

A quote often (falsely) attributed to Joseph Goebbels goes something like "if you repeat a lie often enough, people will eventually come to believe it." This strategy is a key aspect of right-wing propaganda, with a big help from the main-stream media, who seem happy to never challenge anything the right says. 

This seems to be one of the main uses of the Oklahoman's letters section, and thus we find letters like the one from Jesse Pond of Oklahoma City. It is filled with numerous falsehoods and lies, but they are all presented as fact. Let's break them all down:

Gov. Mary Fallin's decision to reject federal funds for Medicaid expansion is a highly principled decision... People need to stop interpreting the phrase “federal funding” to mean “free money from outer space.”

This is a wonderful straw-man. No one has ever imagined that federal money comes from "outer space" in any way. Indeed, everyone is well aware that money comes from taxes. Yet, amazingly, people still want to fund things like Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act!

Every nickel the federal government gets to fling around in this manner came from a taxpayer somewhere. To continue to blow trillions of dollars beyond what they can extract from the overburdened taxpayer will surely lead to catastrophe, not only for the poorest of the poor but for those of us who comprise the vanishing middle class. 

Are taxpayers really overburdened? Certainly not the rich! Indeed, life has been good for the rich since St. Reagan came into office. But don't tell that to the Oklahoman! They want to keep the plutocracy going!

Let tax money stay within state borders and let the bloated federal bureaucracy go on a starvation diet. Then maybe our grandchildren might enjoy the life our grandparents did.

What the hell is this about? This is a total non-sequitur. Just a moment ago, he was complaining that people are overburdened with taxes. Now, it seems that he is upset just that said taxes don't go to the state (which, of course, they do in Oklahoma's case). And stop-- please-- with the canard that somehow our grandchildren are going to suffer thanks to Obama. As Krugman notes, our debt is largely money we owe ourselves! He explains:

People think of debt’s role in the economy as if it were the same as what debt means for an individual: there’s a lot of money you have to pay to someone else. But that’s all wrong; the debt we create is basically money we owe to ourselves, and the burden it imposes does not involve a real transfer of resources. 

That’s not to say that high debt can’t cause problems — it certainly can. But these are problems of distribution and incentives, not the burden of debt as is commonly understood. And as Dean says, talking about leaving a burden to our children is especially nonsensical; what we are leaving behind is promises that some of our children will pay money to other children, which is a very different kettle of fish.

So, yes, please stop. Not like the Oklahoman will, of course. But one can hope.