GOP Misinformation Back in Gear

GOP misinformation is circulating two lies. The first one is that Obama is going to institute a 3.8% tax in 2013 for everyone on selling your house in order to pay for Obamacare. From a seminar on this subject at Schwab I know that this is a gross exaggeration. It applies as a surcharge to investment income for those whose AGI is over $250,000 to help pay for the 50 million now who don't have healthcare. Those under are not affected. Hey, lets not worry about details like that.

The second one says Obama "Vets Retirement Asset Grab" and even comes from Turncoat Dick Morris's website ( He will make money from anyone these days). This email says that Obama is going to merge your retirement 401ks and IRAs funds into Social Security so don't let the Dems and Obama get away with that. Again a gross exaggeration. It seems that this got started before Obama was elected. It can be traced back to a Congressional hearing after the meltdown in Oct 2008 with people seeing 50% or more stock market losses in their 401ks and IRAs. The intent of the hearings in October was to explore whether the Social Security agency might do a better job at managing retirement dollars than the ups and downs of the stock market.

This never went any place but it hasn't stop people from all kinds of wild speculation. Of course left unsaid is that W in his second term was seriously toying with the idea of privatizing Social Security and turning it over to Wall St speculators. Maybe the Tea party will try to bring W's idea back as they try to so away with SOCIAL security.

Compared to the Republican misinformation propaganda machine financed by the billionaire Koch Brothers et.al, Democrats continue to show that they can't effectively communicate to the population in instances I've cited above and like what happened with John Kerry and the Swift Boat veterans. We have an electorate that is 80% ignorant.