You can call it misinformation, spin control or propaganda. Regardless, there are things that some people insist on believing that collide with the inconvenient truths of history.
The assertion that this nation was founded on Christian principles flies in the face of the fact that many of our founders were Deists and not purebred Christians. Thomas Paine, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Ethan Allen and James Monroe might have been baptized into the Anglican Church, but as contemporaries during the Age of Enlightenment, they adopted a belief in the primacy of human reason. For them God or Divine Providence represented a supreme being who created the universe but then stepped back, much like a clockmaker. This God also handed down no text of revelation to us to guide our lives. In fact, Jefferson cut and pasted together his own version of the New Testament. It survives today as the Jefferson Bible and includes much of Jesus' wisdom and proverbs but none of the miracles, has no mention of the supernatural, and ends before the Resurrection. I might not agree with him, but to Jefferson, Jesus was merely a Jewish Plato.
Another fallacy is that today's income tax rates on the wealthy are much too high and raising them would hurt the economy. During the early 1960s, the marginal tax rate for a married couple filing jointly with an income over $400,000 was 91 percent. The economy and stock market boomed and the middle class grew. In 2013, this same tax category carried a marginal tax rate of 35 percent and we have nowhere near a booming economy, but a shrinking middle class and growing income inequality. Furthermore, the redistribution of wealth through taxes was a basic tenet of the founding fathers, and they would not be pleased with our current system. In 1785, Jefferson wrote to James Madison, "Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise."
The safety net provided by Democratic social programs has not proved the ruination of the republic. Many slanders have been thrown at the Affordable Care Act and they echo the old smears against Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare. Alf Landon, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Republican challenger in the 1936 election, vowed to repeal Social Security and branded it "the largest tax bill in history."
In the long run-up to the passage of the Social Security Amendments of 1965, which created Medicare and Medicaid, Ronald Reagan called such legislation "socialized medicine" and warned that "one of these days we are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children, what it once was like in America when men were free." Seniors, remember these baseless, fear-mongering attacks the next time you receive a Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid payment.
And now we have the ACA. We were told that no one would sign up, but today 16.4 million more Americans have medical coverage as a result of Obamacare and the uninsured rate is the lowest in history. Critics called the act a jobs killer, but since it was passed the unemployment rate has dropped from 9.9 percent to 5.1 percent and as many as 90 new health care service companies have sprung up.
We were told that deductibles and premiums would skyrocket, but according to the Commonwealth Fund's analysis of 2014 to 2015, the average ACA marketplace deductibles increased by just 1 percent nationally, compared to 10 percent hikes that were common before. The best news of all is that U.S. health care inflation is the lowest it has been in more than 50 years.
We were also told that the ACA would drive insurers out of the marketplace, but the McKinsey Center for U.S. Health System Reform reported that 56 new insurers have entered the market in 2015.
The GOP claimed the ACA would increase the deficit, but we remain on track to have the smallest annual deficit in eight years.
Lastly, look around. There has been no federal takeover of the health industry and no death panels. Most people in private or employer-provided insurance plans have been little affected by the ACA. Still, there are things that some people insist on believing, even when they collide with the inconvenient truths of history. You might think they'd look it up.
Frank Batavick writes from Westminster. His column appears Fridays. Email him at fjbatavick@gmail.com.
