It is unfair to say that Rick Perry’s Fed Up! is full of lies. It is only partly full of lies. The rest is really bad writing, frighteningly extreme political positions, and arrogant exaltations of jingoistic balderdash. But yeah, there’s a lot of lies in there.
Social Security is a Ponzi scheme. In Fed Up!, waxes a little nutty on the subject of one of the most cherished achievements of the New Deal by calling it a Ponzi scheme. He even name-drops Bernie Madoff because the similarities between modest returns helping senior citizens and ripping off millionaires is so obvious.
“Washington has already blown the money. You can think of it as an IOU that we’re all going to have to pay… this means that our debt will increase all the faster as we pay out more than we take in… Ponzi schemes — like the one that sent Bernard Madoff to prison — are illegal in this country for a reason. They are fraudulent systems designed to take in a lot of money at the front and pay out none in the end… Deceptive accounting has hoodwinked the American public into thinking that Social Security is a retirement system and financially sound, when clearly it is not.”
Politifact Texas, perhaps being overly literal, slapped this one with a false label because Social Security is not, in fact or in practice, a criminal enterprise:
In contrast, the administration says, Social Security is more like a “pay-as-you-go” system transferring payroll tax payments by American workers to American retirees. Its web post closes: “The first modern social insurance program began in Germany in 1889 and has been in continuous operation for more than 100 years. The American Social Security system has been in continuous successful operation since 1935. Charles Ponzi’s scheme lasted barely 200 days.” …
We’d add that Social Security is accountable to Congress and the American people while a Ponzi scheme is a crime.
Their pith is note-perfect. Moving on.
Social Security and Medicare are unconstitutional. He danced all over this in Fed Up!, and it’s especially delicious that he has to campaign against an actual constitutional law professor if he wins the nomination. But the fact is that Rick Perry’s view of what the Constitution allows the federal government to do is most commonly found in embittered screeds in Republican college newsletters written by lonely sophomores who just discovered Ayn Rand. The Daily Beast‘s Andrew Romano challenged him on his view that these New Deal programs are unconstitutional, and this is what Perry said:
I don’t think our founding fathers when they were putting the term “general welfare” in there were thinking about a federally operated program of pensions nor a federally operated program of health care. What they clearly said was that those were issues that the states need to address. Not the federal government. I stand very clear on that.
Romano asked, in effect, “Dude, really?” and pointed out that on page 116 of Fed Up!, Perry actually dropped the phrase “general welfare” from an excerpt he quotes from the Constitution. That’s right, Rick Perry edited the Constitution to buttress his opinion that the Founding Fathers would not have allowed Social Security and Medicare. Perry’s actually a strict de-constructionist when it comes to the Constitution. I’m not sure I could improve on the beatdown that Ian Millhiser of Think Progress lays on Rick Perry here:
Perry’s reading of the Constitution raises very serious questions about whether he understands the English language. The Constitution gives Congress the power to “to lay and collect taxes” and to “provide for the…general welfare of the United States.” No plausible interpretation of the words “general welfare” does not include programs that ensure that all Americans can live their entire lives secure in the understanding that retirement will not force them into poverty and untreated sickness.
Frankly, there’s a lot more to what Perry says about Social Security that bears examination, but there are just so many lies to get to. Onward.
Woodrow Wilson passed the 16th Amendment creating the federal income tax. Rick Perry’s schtick in Fed Up! includes the Tea Party idiocy of repealing the 16th and 17th Amendments that created a federal income tax and direct election of U.S. Senators, respectively. Let’s leave for another day the idea that the Texas legislature is better suited to choose our Senators than you and I. What raised eyebrows over at Politifact was Perry blaming the 16th Amendment on President Wilson during his appearance on The Daily Show:
“Seriously?” Stewart said.
“Yeah,” Perry said. “Wilson and the Progressive movement started …” He paused and then continued. “The 16th Amendment. If you want to know when Washington really got off the track, the 16th Amendment, giving them the opportunity to take your money with a personal income tax.”
We’ve got a pretty big problem here. No, it’s not that Presidents have as much effect on constitutional amendments as stepfathers have on the color of the eyes of their stepchildren. There’s a bigger problem with this one, and it’s pretty galling that it got past all the conservative lawyers Perry credits in the acknowledgements:
But the income tax didn”t originate in Wilson”s era. Indeed, Americans first paid an income tax 50 years earlier. Congress approved a federal income tax in 1861 to help cover the expenses of the Civil War; it expired in 1872.Then in 1894, Congress agreed to impose a flat-rate income tax of 2 percent on incomes over $4,000. But in 1895, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that approach unconstitutional because the tax was not apportioned according to the population of each state, as the Constitution then required. (That meant, for example, that if 5 percent of the U.S. population lived in Virginia, no more than 5 percent of the tax”s total revenue could come from Virginia.)
The 16th Amendment removed this constitutional barrier by authorizing Congress to collect taxes on individual incomes “without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.” It was ratified by the states in February 1913, a month before Wilson’s inauguration.
Go back and read that last sentence again. The 16th Amendment was in the Constitution before Wilson showed up for work.
Perry says the federal government regulates how much salt you put in your food. This comes from an oft-quoted paragraph in the first chapter of Fed Up! that reaches staggering heights of lyrical idiocy:
“We are fed up with being overtaxed and overregulated. We are tired of being told how much salt we can put on our food, what windows we can buy for our house, what kind of cars we can drive, what kinds of guns we can own, what kind of prayers we are allowed to and where we can say them, what political speech we are allowed to use to elect candidates, what kind of energy we can use, what kind of food we can grow, what doctor we can see and countless other restrictions on our right to live as we see fit.”
A lot of Perry’s book is like this. When he gets on these rants, he reminds me of that one conservative uncle at Thanksgiving who tries to engage you in a political discussion just so he can blow wine breath all over you while killing the table conversation with a rant that he half-remembers from Glenn Beck. But salt? My 8-year-old dumped a ton of it on his baked potato tonight. I’ve got a watermelon salad in the fridge with some sea salt on it.
The truth, of course, is that this mildly inflammatory claim was based on an erroneous Washington Post article about a proposed, but as-yet unadopted FDA regulation about limiting salt in processed foods. There’s absolutely nothing in the rule that will stop you from ruining your baked potato because you lack restraint with a salt shaker, for example. For reasons wholly unrelated to my children, Politifact rated that claim as “false.”
Perry says Washington is telling us what light bulbs to use. Fans of both Jon Stewart and the Texas Republican congressional delegation should be familiar with the burbling hysteria about federal regulations about light bulbs which are to the Tea Party what fear-mongering about water fluoridation was to cranks in the 1970s.
Here’s the truth: In 2009, Obama announced new efficiency standards for light bulbs, saying it would save Americans $6 billion a year on their energy bills.
Starting in August 2012, fluorescent tube lamps (most commonly found in offices and stores) and conventional incandescent reflector lamps must become more efficient. The government said such fluorescent and incandescent lamps represented approximately 38 percent and 7 percent, respectively, of total lighting energy use. …Jen Stutsman, spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Energy, told us that conventional incandescent bulbs are not expected to meet the efficiency standards Congress set, though the government expects manufacturers to improve incandescent technologies to meet the higher standards or consumers will move to compact fluorescent light bulbs, LED technologies or halogens. She said new standards for 100-watt bulbs take effect in January 2012. New standards for 75-watt bulbs start in 2013 and standards for 60- and 40-watt bulbs start in 2014.
Stutsman said the expected shifts aren’t equivalent to the government telling Americans which light bulbs to use. “Under no circumstances does it say that a consumer must purchase a specific type of light bulb,” Stutsman said.
Politifact says Perry’s claim was “mostly false.” I call it “embarrassing for a public official with a college degree, even if it was Texas A&M.”
The bigger deceptions, however, aren’t factual. Where Rick Perry really stretches the truth is in his worldview that equates his opinion with America’s, but that’s a story for another day.
A political consultant, writer and family man, Jason Stanford writes columns for MSNBC and the Austin American-Statesman and is nationally syndicated by Cagle Cartoons. He's also a political analyst for KTBC and coauthored "Adios Mofo: Why Rick Perry will make America miss George W. Bush."
Gov. Perry’s ghost-written book is merely his attempt to convey an image of a literate Alger Hiss, whose pragmatism is based in good ol’ American principles and values. The fact that it is ghost-written bespeaks of his literacy. As far as his being a reincarnation of Mr. Hiss, an everyman, he betrays his roots with his assault on working class Texas families – a traitor to the class of his birth. The Perry pragmatism has its underpinnings in extreme ignorance of Texas and US history, legal traditions, economics and political culture. Perry is representative of a populist, anti-intellectualism that pervades the thoughts and minds of the uninformed brand of pop conservatives. To posit that Perry is a liar does not fully explain his record as Texas Governor and his political philosophy, rather, I contend that he is dull-witted and delusional and, paradoxically, a political savant. He honestly believes in his perception of reality. He has taken an ill-informed view of the world and constructed a cosmology that denies the reality of the most rational,sentient beings. Perry depends on non-facts to explain his obscured version of real life and how things work. The omission of seemingly obvious facts in Perry’s arguments evidence his psychosis. His political genius, his ability to play the game have allowed him to infect the discourse, impose his twisted agendas and inflict misguided policies. There is an insanity, a disengenuiness and insidiousness about Perry and I hope that the American people recognize and reject it.
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