


The “Fiscal Cliff” Hoax | Dale Tavris

Dale Tavris, MD, MPHDale Tavris, MD, MPHDale Tavris -- World News Trust

Nov. 21, 2012

The scare of a so-called “Fiscal Cliff” is basically a trick created by rightwing elites to get us to accept cuts to social safety net programs like Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare -- as well as to extend the Bush tax cuts for the rich.

If extending tax cuts for the rich doesn’t sound to you like a good way to reduce the federal deficit, you’re not alone. Yet despite the massive evidence to the contrary, and against the opinions of any decent economist not in the pockets of Wall Street, the right wing elite want us to believe that decreasing their taxes will create jobs, reduce the federal deficit and stimulate our economy.

The so-called “Fiscal Cliff”

So what exactly is the “fiscal cliff”? At the end of Dec. 31, 2012, two things will happen if some sort of deal isn’t cut to prevent it. One is that the Bush tax cuts for the rich will expire, and the top marginal tax rate will go back to the 39.6 percent that it was during the Clinton administration. That in itself would go a long way towards reducing our federal deficit. And it would not reduce jobs or slow down job growth. During the Clinton Presidency our economy was much better, unemployment was much lower, and small businesses grew twice as fastas after the Bush tax cuts for the rich. And we then had a budget surplus.

Along with taxes on the rich going back up to Clinton-era levels, there would also be a modest rise in taxes on the middle class. So how could that be rectified? Legislation has already been passed by the U.S. Senate to restore the middle class tax cuts in 2013, and President Obama has vowed to sign that into law if the House goes along with it. Would the House dare to refuse to do that? What would that do to their re-election chances?

The other thing that will happen after the end of this year if a deal isn’t cut first is that there will be various automatic cuts to domestic and military spending. Those consequences are not cut in stone, but rather are a Tea Party/GOP manufactured crisis. They demanded those future automatic cuts in the summer of 2011 in return for their agreeing to raise the debt ceiling so that our country could pay its debts and avoid crashing the economy. It was blackmail. Right wing zealots in Congress created this “crisis,” and they could just as easily un-create it by acquiescing to a reversal of the spending cuts they voted for in 2011.

This is what Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman had to say about the so-called “fiscal cliff”:


And as for their motives:


The real crisis

So why did Krugman say that the danger “is not that the deficit will be too large but that it will be too small”? Our federal deficit at this time is not all that much larger as a percentage of our GDP than it has been in the past, as you can see from this chart:


Our major problem at this time is our very weak economy and the joblessness that goes along with it. Economists have long known that this kind of problem is not solved by decreasing spending, but by increasing it on things that put people to work. It is exacerbated by the kind of severe income and wealth inequality that our country is now experiencing and that our right wing elites want to make even more severe. It is exacerbated by cuts to social safety net programs that our right wing elites want to privatize and destroy. Robert Borosage explains:


"Austerity is, paradoxically, likely to undermine the stated goal of deficit reduction. Cutting spending… in a weak economy destroys jobs and slows growth. The increased unemployment leads to declining tax revenue as well as increased demands on government services, all of which adds to the deficit. This is the famous “debt trap” recently experienced in much of Europe, where premature and harsh austerity drove many EU countries into recession.


What Americans do not want

Most Americans are against what the rightwing elites are trying to force upon on with their “fiscal cliff” scare. They are against “requiring deep cuts in domestic programs without protecting programs for infants, poor children, schools and college aid” (75 percent); they are against “cutting discretionary spending, like education, child nutrition, worker training and disease control (72 percent); they are against cutting taxes for the rich and corporations (67 percent), and; they are against “reducing Social Security benefits by having them rise more slowly than the cost of living” (62 percent). And all this is despite the massive propaganda efforts of our right wing elites.

What we should do

Robert Borosage sums up the situation that we now face, and how we should address it:







Dale Tavris has worked as an epidemiologist and public health physician in state public health departments, the U.S. Air Force, the Medical College of Wisconsin, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) since 1979. He has published dozens of scientific articles in medical and public health journals, and three books (“Philosophy in Epidemiology and Public Health” and “The Unfulfilled Promise of the American Dream”, and “Democracy Undone”). Dr. Tavris was the data coordinator and an election analyst for the Election Defense Alliance where he specialized in analyzing election related data for evidence of fraud. Articles that he authored or co-authored in that capacity include: An analysis of voter reports which documented the voters’ witnessing of their vote switching from Kerry to Bush on touch screen voting machines; “Coalescing Evidence of Massive Voter Registration Fraud in Ohio 2004”; “Fingerprints of Election Theft: Were Competitive Contests Targeted”, and; “Excessive Undervotes in Ohio Diebold Counties – Senate Race 2006”, among others.

Now available at , 'Democracy Undone - Unequal Representation, the Threat to our Election System, and the Impending Demise of American Democracy' (a book about how election fraud and other problems with our election system are undermining our democracy) by Dale Tavris

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