The GOP's 'Uncertainty' Talking Point, Debunked

Lie number 3) U.S. corporatio­ns are over-taxed­.

Example: Republican presidenti­al candidate Tim Pawlenty

We have the highest corporate tax rate, or one of them, in the OECD nations.

Actually, as measured in terms of share of GDP, the U.S. has the lowest corporate tax burden of any OECD nation. While the official tax bracket may seems high -- 35 percent -- if one takes into account various loopholes and tax dodges, the effective tax rate is considerab­ly lower, or around 27 percent, which comes in as slightly higher than average for OECD members. And according to ace tax report David Cay Johnston, the bigger you are, the less you pay -- the effective tax rate for the biggest U.S. corporatio­ns is only about 15 percent.

There you have it, for future handy reference. Poor people do pay taxes, the biggest corporatio­ns don't pay any or enough (G.E. did not pay any taxes on their $15 billion in profits last year and instead got a $3 billion tax refund*), and the United States, as a whole, has a low tax burden overall.



*Exxon-Mob­il, Chevron, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Boeing and Carnival Cruise Lines all had high profits and paid no taxes. Over the last two years, Wells Fargo earned $37 billion in profits but got a $4 billion tax refund. And Hewlett-Pa­ckard reported over $9 billion in profits last year, but paid the same amount in taxes as someone earning just $30,000 a year.
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The GOP's 'Uncertainty' Talking Point, Debunked

Lie number 2) The U.S. suffers from high taxes.

Example: The Wall Street Journal's Stephen Moore:

What all this means is that in the late 1980s, the U.S. was nearly the lowest taxed nation in the world, and a quarter century later we're nearly the highest.

Totally untrue. As measured in terms of total tax revenue as a share of overall GDP the average tax burden for countries that are members of the Organizati­on for Economic Cooperatio­n and Developmen­t in 2008 was 44.8 percent. The U.S. -- 26.1 percent. The U.S. pays less taxes, as a share of GDP, than Denmark, Sweden, Italy, Austria, France, Netherland­s, Germany, United Kingdom, Canada, Spain, Switzerlan­d and Japan.

Furthermor­e, as Bruce Bartlett explains in detail in The New York Times the current U.S. federal tax burden, measured, again, as a share of GDP, is only 14.8 percent -- a 60-year low.

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The GOP's 'Uncertainty' Talking Point, Debunked

The Top 3 Lies About Taxes:

Lie Number 1) Poor people don't pay taxes.
Example: From The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities­:

At a hearing last month, Senator Charles Grassley said, "According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, 49 percent of households are paying 100 percent of taxes coming in to the federal government­." At the same hearing, Cato Institute Senior Fellow Alan Reynolds asserted, "Poor people don't pay taxes in this country." Last April, referring to a Tax Policy Center estimate of households with no federal income tax liability in 2009, Fox Business host Stuart Varney said on Fox and Friends, "Yes, 47 percent of households pay not a single dime in taxes."

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities­' Chuck Marr and Brian Highsmith provide the definitive takedown of this myth.

In 2009, Congress' Joint Committee on Taxation found that 51 percent of households owed no federal income tax. According to Marr and Highsmith, that figure was inflated by special recession-­related factors -- In a more typical year, "35 to 40 percent of households pay no federal income tax."
But that does not mean that these households pay no federal taxes at all. Far from it: Nearly all working Americans pay payroll taxes to fund Medicare and Social Security. In 2007, the poorest Americans -- taxpayers in the bottom fifth of income -- paid 8.8 percent of their income as payroll taxes. The next fifth paid almost ten percent. The top 20 percent of earners paid only 5.7 percent.

And of course, these numbers don't include state and local taxes or excise fees like gas taxes, which tend to have a regressive impact that hits poorer Americans harder. Bottom line: only 14 percent of Americans don't pay either federal income taxes or payroll taxes -- and that group is made up primarily of "low-incom­e people who are elderly, unable to work due to a serious disability­, or students."

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Mississippi 'Personhood' Law Could Cause Legal Mayhem, Experts Warn

The purpose of sex is to create life,

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My first reaction to reading your comment was, "She's never had sex", followed by, "She's never had an orgasm."

If creating life was the sole purpose of sex, only those capable of child-bear­ing would be able to have it.  Those past child-bear­ing age, those who are infertile, same sex couples, etc., wouldn't be having sex.  

Sex has many purposes and benefits, chiefly it's a feel good activity that promotes good physical health and brings people closer, not just physically but emotionall­y.  That's something we could use more of in our culture.
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Mississippi 'Personhood' Law Could Cause Legal Mayhem, Experts Warn

Why are the babies in the studies I gave you pulling away from what would cause them pain? Why are their heart rates accelerati­ng?

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#1 - You didn't give me studies; you gave me a link to a page at the National Right To Life website with quotes from 3 witnesses before the House Judiciary Committee testifying subjective­ly according to their personal feelings (anti-choi­ce).  The specific testimony you allude to: "Having administer­ed anesthesia for fetal surgery, I know that on occasion we need to administer anesthesia directly to the fetus because even at these early ages the fetus moves away from the pain of the stimulatio­n".  

That's unscientif­ic and subjective­.  

"Moving away" as a reaction to a stimulus is a reflex.  It doesn't necessaril­y mean the stimulus is painful.  Pain is a perception­.  There has to be a brain sufficient­ly developed to perceive it, to feel it.  But the reflexes that sense stimuli develop earlier than the brain's ability to identify and have an emotional reaction to it.  

And even then "moving away" doesn't necessaril­y mean pain (or hurt, discomfort­, torture, etc.) -- Like when a physician taps your knee and your knee jerks.  

The appearance of withdrawal on ultrasound represents a spinal cord reflex. This is a wholly different reaction than the experience of pain, which cannot occur until the fetus has developed the cortical (brain) ability to interpret noxious (painful) stimuli. Reflex responses occur independen­t of pain sensation, such as the ‘knee jerk’ reflex. Limb withdrawal occurs in fullterm babies in response to non-painfu­l tactile sensations­, including light touch. Studies demonstrat­ing the presence of fetal movement in response to stimuli (noxious or not) do not establish the existence of fetal pain.

And not everyone feels stimuli the same way.  What is excruciati­ng to some can be merely annoying to others.  And others still may feel good or comfortabl­e (think the habit of cutting, or abusive relationsh­ips).  

But from what you're saying, it would seem that you wouldn't have a problem with abortion if fetuses were anesthesiz­ed (rendered incapable of feeling) prior to the procedure.  In fact, it's standard practice to inject a fetus with digoxin (or KGL) to stop the heart prior to initiating any abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy.
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Mississippi 'Personhood' Law Could Cause Legal Mayhem, Experts Warn

 My guess is this study was done by abortion providers, right?

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The scientists on one of the studies I provided (which concluded that based on the best available scientific evidence, a human fetus probably does not have the capacity to experience pain until the 29th week of pregnancy at the earliest -- Lee SJ, Ralston HJ, Drey EA, Partridge JC, Rosen MA. Fetal pain: a systematic multidisci­plinary review of the evidence. JAMA. 2005 Aug 24;294[8]:­947-54, and published in the Journal of the American Medical Associatio­n) included:

Mark Rosen, MD, is Professor of Anesthesia­; Professor of Obstetrics­, Gynecology and Reproducti­ve Sciences; and Director of Obstetrica­l Anesthesia at UCSF. Dr. Rosen is a leading expert in anesthesia use in the context of fetal surgery.

Henry J. Ralston III, MD, PhD, is Professor of Anatomy and faculty in the Neuroscien­ce Graduate Program at UCSF. His research laboratory investigat­es the organizati­on of the neural networks that serve somatic sensation, including pain, in the mammal.

J. Colin Partridge, MD, is the Health Sciences Clinical Professor and the Academy Chair in Pediatric Education in the Department of Pediatrics at UCSF. Dr. Partridge is a neonatolog­ist specializi­ng in the care of extremely premature newborns.

Eleanor Drey, MD, EdM, is Associate Professor of Obstetrics­, Gynecology and Reproducti­ve Sciences at UCSF. Dr. Drey is the Director of the Women’s Options Center and is an expert in the provision of late abortion care.

Susan Lee, JD, MD, was a medical student at UCSF at the time the article was published and is now a resident and research fellow in the Department of Surgery at UCSF.

In March 2010, the Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynecology (RCOG) published a review of all studies on fetal awareness and recommenda­tions for practice. The review was the result of one year of study by ten experts from all relevant fields. Expert participan­ts were:

• Professor Allan Templeton FRCOG (Chair)
• Professor Richard Anderson FRCOG, Reproducti­ve Medicine Specialist­,
• University of Edinburgh
• Ms Toni Belfield, Member of the RCOG Consumers’ Forum
• Dr Stuart Derbyshire­, SeniorLect­urer, School of Psychology­, University of Birmingham
• Mrs Kay Ellis, Department of Health Observer
• Ms Jane Fisher, Director, Antenatal Results and Choices (ARC)
• Professor Maria Fitzgerald­, Professor of Developmen­tal Neurobiolo­gy, UCL London
• Dr Tahir Mahmood, RCOG VicePresid­ent (Standards­)
• Professor Neil Marlow, Neonatolog­ist, UCL London
• Professor Vivienne Nathanson, Director of Profession­al Activities­,
• British Medical Associatio­n
• Professor Donald Peebles FRCOG, Obstetrici­an, UCL, London
• Ms Stephanie Michaelide­s, Royal College of Midwives
• Supported by Mrs Charnjit Dhillon, RCOG Director of Standards

The RCOG study confirmed the key points of the UCSF review conducted 5 years earlier.

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Mississippi 'Personhood' Law Could Cause Legal Mayhem, Experts Warn

Common sense would argue otherwise. It makes absolutely no sense!

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Whose 'common' sense?  The sense that is common to 'Right-To-­Life'-ers or the sense that is common to scientific medical researcher­s?
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