TL;DR: the federal government always shows a surplus every april, if by "surplus", you're comparing the amount of money the IRS receives--just in april, with the amount of money it costs to run the government--just in april, which is of course not really a surplus. in this article, i dissect and flatten a sean hannity article, showing how building a fantasy story around an out-of-context truth nugget. in our new post-factual world, telling the truth simply means telling people what they want to hear. basically, a case-study in confirmation bias.
check out this recent story...
in short, this is a lie, and i can prove it using hannity's own words, and his own article.
watch this...
ok, for starters, if you support trump, then you have no incentive to look behind this curtain.
but as a good citizen, trump supporter or not, you really shouldn't believe anything without looking a few steps into it.
in short, right wing media has discovered, that their followers aren't interested in the truth, as much as they are interested in reading reports that confirm what they already believe.
they've also discovered, if you craft a story's title carefully, you can get the reader to draw the conclusion that you want them to, and even get them to believe it was their own intelligent reasoning that got them there. i mean, who do we believe more than ourselves, right?
so let's go... let's break down the anatomy of a sean hannity lie.
the idea hannity wants you to think you came up with yourself, is that the federal government, under trump is turning the corner when it comes to generating revenue. and that is, if you lower taxes, let individuals and businesses keep and spend their own money, the stronger the economy will become. in this scenario, if you lower tax rates, the government will actually pull in more tax revenue. this actually happened a few years under clinton. it hasn't happened since, but it is possible.
i won't even touch the idea of why conservatives think it's a good thing for the federal government to have MORE money, but let's assume what they mean is that we can take that $160mill and pay down a bit of that $22bill national debt. i think he hopes you come up with that idea "yourself" too.
problem is, that isn't what happened here.
in the body of the hannity article, they're very good to give you a couple of hyperlinks to inform you that they got this information from the associated press. so for those who want this story to be true, there's little incentive for clicking on that link. hey, hannity gave me some reputable links, so surely it must all be true.
after all, clicking more might be confusing. it might contain some if's and but's that i don't want to cloud my happiness, or worse, might actually lead me to believe that trump is doing a bad job with the economy, and i just don't want to believe that.
ok, so let's click it anyway...
wait... not yet.
let's first realize something hannity isn't telling you. the federal government ALWAYS has a monthly surplus EACH and EVERY april, because that's the month that most of its taxes are collected. so basically, according to hannity, part of what makes "AMERICA GREAT AGAIN" (according to the title of the article) is the fact that the IRS collects more money in april than it costs to operate the government...just for april.
really? that's what makes america great? that the IRS collects a lot of taxes in april? [eyeroll]
other than during the clinton years, which enjoyed a couple of *annual* surpluses, every president since ONLY turns a surplus in april, every april.
so straight away, at best, this article is well cultivated manure.
ok, so let's click through now...
"But even with a flood of tax receipts, the deficit so far this year is running 37.7% higher than a year ago."
funny... hannity didn't mention that part
"The deficit for the first seven months of the budget year that began Oct. 1 totals $530.9 billion, compared to a deficit of $385.5 billion for the same period a year ago."
yikes... i wonder what might have caused the annual deficit to go up?
"The deficits have increased following congressional passage in December 2017 of a $1.5 trillion tax cut promoted by President Donald Trump as well as a boost last year in spending on domestic and military programs."
"This year’s surplus was down from a $214.3 billion surplus in April 2018."
Interesting... so, the 2017 budget (one could say, obama's last budget) resulted in a $214b surplus in april 2018, while trump's first budget, in 2018, resulted in only a $160b surplus in april 2019. man... and i wasn't even going for the whole "blame it on the other guy" thing. ;-)
for some reason hannity failed to mention that either... huh...
ok, so, forget obama for a second. so, EVEN if you say that both 2018 and 2019 april surpluses "belong" to trump, fine, then how does hannity explain why 2018 was better than 2019?
a. he doesn't
b. he actually claims that the 2019 $160bill is an "all time high" (uh, but it's not)
"So far this year, receipts [from trump's new tariff strategy] are up 1.8 percent to $2 trillion while [overall federal] spending is up 7.6% to $2.57 trillion."
so much for "revenues are at an all time high"... lies.
the small-government, fiscally conservative republicans are spending more money we don't have than the democrats ever did before.
and to find all this just took one more mouse click and a few more minutes of reading.
hannity does this crap all the time. but he's smart, he knows that if he tells his adoring audience what they want to hear, he knows good chance they aren't going to click through and check it out.
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