From McCain’s ad titled “Patriot”:
Obama and Biden voted to raise taxes on working American making just $42,000.
Higher taxes on seniors and their life savings.
Higher taxes on your electric bills.
There are two questionable statements here.
There is no call in Obama’s tax plan to tax life savings, but Obama does have a plan to raise capital gain taxes. The proposal would impact the tax rate on investment accounts, including 401(k) and 403(b) accounts. For families with incomes above $250k, their capital gain tax would raise from 15% to no more than 20%.
Do investment accounts count as “life savings?” We’d call this close, but not a definitive lie though it’s dubious at best to consider an investment, which bears inherent risk, as savings when savings implies no inherent risk.
But McCain’s reference to high electric bill taxes has no basis. They base their claim on an interview with the San Antonio Express-News on February 19, 2008:
GUERRA: Have you considered other funding sources, say taxing emerging energy forms, for example, say a penny per kilowatt hour on wind energy?
OBAMA: Well, that’s clean energy, and we want to drive down the cost of that, not raise it. We need to give them subsidies so they can start developing that. What we ought to tax is dirty energy, like coal and, to a lesser extent, natural gas.
Obama suggested a tax on “dirty energy”, but did not call for any electricity tax. (Neither his formal energy plan or tax plan make reference of any tax for either energy production or consumption, though there is a call for a windfall profit tax which would include oil companies.)
McCain’s campaign is lying when they switch Obama’s conditional statement about taxing energy producers, as a call for taxes on electricity consumption.
Tags: johnmccain.com
September 21st, 2008 at 11:17 pm
i dont know how to contact you other than to leave a comment. while i applaud your efforts to bring truth to this campaign, i think it is unfair to compare mccain vs. obama in number of lies. first, i believe both candidates are guilty of misrepresenting the truth or taking it out of context, which is wrong in of itself. but a lie indicates intent and i dont believe either mccain or obama truly wants to lie. second, there are websites on both sides that list so called lie after lie after lie ad nauseum. on your website, it seems to be skewed in the direction of which candidate you focus on for the day. i could play perpetual gotcha ping pong and never stop until november 4 if i chose to do so. if you are partisan towards one candidate, then focus on bringing to light the errors of the other candidate. otherwise, it would seem fairer to just rotate the findings.
September 22nd, 2008 at 2:33 pm
Thanks for your comments, Linda. Seemingly or not, we don’t deliberately focus more attention on one candidate or another - at least in the way you suggest. Rather, we take each case as it comes in, either by user submissions or by general news reporting that we run across. We have actually been trying to offset any media bias by investigating the party with a lower score more heavily. What you see is what we’ve found.
It is a fair critique to suggest that lie designates intention, and there is always the possibility that their intentions are good and it’s an honest mistake. If it is, and they correct it, we gladly remove the lie designation. It’s notable that corrections are surprisingly very few to date, even when generally agreed upon as not true.
More about what is considered a lie here:
http://liecount.com/what-is-a-lie/
September 22nd, 2008 at 6:59 pm
I think that taxing energy producers *will* result in higher prices for consumers as energy producers pass the cost along to the purchasing public. Whereas I agree that Obama did not explicitly support a “tax” on electric bills, taxing energy producers does increase the retail cost of energy that we ultimately pay. Since he wants to tax “dirty energy” and none of us has a choice about whether or not our electricity comes from a “dirty” source, we can expect higher energy bills if our local producer uses coal to generate electricity.
Again, I agree with your sticking to a formal definition of a lie; this allows for objective classification and should help determine inaccuracies in speeches given by candidates. However, the current definition does not leave a lot of room for “rehetorical expedience” which may not be “technically” accurate, but is more “true” than the technical definition. It’s hard to throw the multi-step logic that I just outlined into a speech or a “town hall” question-and-answer session. Sometimes, it really is more expedient and “true” to say “tax” when it comes to paying for something you need, even though it may be technically false.
September 22nd, 2008 at 9:04 pm
Taxing energy producers for “dirty” energy may very well increase costs for consumers, but it’s the most effective way for government to influence the direction of private business. Big business has shown that without regulation it will take the course of most profit and least resistance, and we obviously cannot place our goals of clean and independent energy in the hands of the companies who stand to make the most money from squelching new alternatives.
Our government must influence the energy business in the language of money. Even at the consumer level if we had instituted a $.25 - 1$/gallon at-the-pump tax 8 years ago like many people we’re advocating, we could be billions of dollars into research and development of cleaner, cheaper, and OPEC-free sources of energy. Instead we’ve had the oil companies making obscene amounts of money hiring well-connected lobbyists to whisper in the ears of the men and women supposed to representing OUR interests.
McCain has shown his true colors by stumping for offshore drilling with lax oversight, which will do nothing for the consumer or the price at the pump and everything for the oil companies to act in their own interest by maintaining the environment that has given them the billions upon billions.
September 22nd, 2008 at 10:21 pm
I thought the topic in question was whether or not an outright “lie” was told. I didn’t argue the merits of such a “tax”. I only stated that John McCain may have technically lied characterizing Obama’s “dirty energy tax” as a tax on electric bills. However, he may have been more immediately accurate about the effects such a tax would have on the average energy consumer.
As to whether or not higher taxes guarantee the invention of alternative new energy sources, the Europeans have exacted very high taxes on fuel for decades and they are still heavily dependent on fossil fuels. They do have much more energy efficient cars and they do make much more use of nuclear power (a controversial topic by itself), but they still haven’t invented any *new* sources of energy.
But, you may be right overall. Most of the fundamental advances in technology over the past 500 years have occurred as the result of a synthesis of efforts from all major international players. If the US sits this out, we could slow possible achievement in this area to the detriment of everyone else.
Basically, neither of us really knows for sure. We don’t have any kind of comparative evidence that states research and development becomes more successful because gasoline is $5/gallon and our monthly electric bills go up a certain percentage. It’s also unfair to characterize a tax-increase as debilitating. Again, using available comparative data from Europe, they have high taxes on energy and still manage to do well economically (present-day banking disasters notwithstanding).
All in all, I just can’t really say with any kind of certainty whether raising or lowering taxes either causes or eliminates more problems in the long run.
September 23rd, 2008 at 7:53 pm
You’re right that the focus here was wether or not it was a deliberate lie, but I think a lot of the “gotcha” stuff is immaterial and the important part is the underlying meaning and motive. Tax incentives for energy companies is not “higher taxes on your electricity bills” except in a distorted view of reality. More importantly, McCain is attempting to twist Obama’s energy plan into tax fear-mongering.
McCain has a 15-year record of voting against energy efficiency, environmental protection, and any attempt to develop or produce alternative energy. Now in the face of a climate crisis and an energy quagmire, he has the gall to distort and demonize the candidate for attempting to fix the mess McCain helped create?
September 24th, 2008 at 5:51 pm
The opening line of this entry quotes the McCain ad as claiming ‘Obama and Biden voted to raise taxes on working American making just $42,000′. But you then point out that the capital gains tax only rises ‘For families with incomes above $250k’. So why isn’t the opening line a straight-out lie?