Please! Just Tell the Truth!

In today's Austin American-Statesman there is an opinion article entitled "China bashers are passing the buck," by someone whose last name is apparently Hassett and who is director of economic-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

I don't know if I agree with the opinions he expresses in the article, and that is not the point of this comment. He may be exactly right in his opinions. The point of this comment is that one of the reasons I can't tell if I agree with him or not, one of the reasons I am not persuaded by his arguments, is that one of the "facts" he states is not true. Because of that, I have to wonder if any of the other "facts" he states are true.

He says, "[W]e [the United States] have ... the second-highest coproate tax rates on earth."

There are lots of facts he asserts which I am too ignorant to even wonder about, but I knew enough to wonder about that. More than wonder, I thought, "That surely isn't true." So, I took a few minutes on the internet to check it out. It turns out, as I suspected, that it isn't true.

The corporate tax rates in the United States range from 15% to 39%. If you look at the highest tax rate - 39% - there are at least six other countries which have higher top corporate tax rates than the United States.

Many countries, however, have fixed corporate tax rates, not a range. If you compare the fixed tax rate of those countries to the average of our range, there are many, many countries with higher corporate tax rates than ours. So many I didn't even bother to count.

Of the countries who do have ranges, like we do, if you compare the low end of our range to the low end of their range, there are at least eight other countries which have higher bottom corporate tax rates than the United States and several others who have the same bottom corporate tax rates as the United States.

My point is not to argue that our U.S. corporate tax rate is either good or bad, set correctly or incorrectly. My point is to argue that, no matter how you slice it, the corporate tax rates in the United States are not the second highest in the world. That statement is simply ... false.

We have to stop telling ourselves things that are not true. By ourselves, I mean both our fellow citizens and, literally, ourselves. The more we tell ourselves something that is not true, the more we begin to believe that it is true. This has to stop, or we're doomed.

We cannot possibly ever agree on solutions or even on the nature of the problem if we are all choosing to believe different things, some of which are just not true. Even things which are obviously not true.

This is particularly galling in the case of this article by Mr. (or Mrs. or Miss, I can't tell which) Hassett because it is published in the Austin American-Statesman, which has a regular feature in which they research statements made by politicians and rank them on whether they are truthful or not. The fact that they would publish something on their opinion page with a statement which five minutes on the internet would show was untrue is, at the risk of being too dramatic, appalling. Utterly appalling!

Stop it! Please!

Just tell the truth!