How To Filter The Truth From Progressive Gaslighting

Recently, I wrote about how progressive Democrats were pervasively gaslighting the American people. By gaslighting, I mean the manipulation of people by psychological means into questioning their own sanity. Since the majority of the legacy media (ABC, CBS, NBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, etc., etc.) have been supporting this gaslighting, progressives have enjoyed considerable success in getting people to believe them. How, then, can we filter the truth from the many lies we are told?

This is an old theme for me. What makes this problem such a hard one to solve is the pervasiveness and sheer volume of the propaganda. Moreover, progressive Democrats almost religiously believe in most of their own falsehoods. The ideological war between Democrats and Republicans possesses the fanaticism of all religious wars. Evidence for these assertions can be found in the two posts The Lies Progressives Tell (Especially To Themselves!) and More Lies Progressives Tell To Themselves.

In what follows, recent examples of progressive whoppers will be examined. By analyzing them, perhaps we can discover a general way to filter out the truth.

Recent Examples of Progressive Assertions

What we greatly need is a scientific method for testing ideological statements. Observation and data collection should always precede theorizing. The examples listed below are not meant to be comprehensive. They are merely illustrative. So let the observations commence!

Item: The Biden administration says the U.S. border with Mexico is closed.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas consistently claims that our southern border with Mexico is closed. In addition, he has asserted the U.S. is expelling families and adults illegally crossing the border. Yet, these claims by the Biden Administration are inconsistent with videos provided by many of the news media. These videos have been supplied by ABC News, NBC News, CNN, Fox News, and BBC News. Below is shown one of a number of Fox News videos as an example.

So, who are you going to believe? Progressive Democrats or your lying eyes?

Item: Progressives claim economic problems can be solved by increasing government demand for goods and services.

Ever since the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Democrats’ sovereign remedy for any economic troubles has been to increase government demands for goods and services. This Democratic proclivity has continued to the present day with huge federal government spending programs, including the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act.

Yet, increasing government economic demand does nothing but increase inflation if production of needed goods and services cannot supply the added demand. The more government appropriates economic capital, the less is available for private companies to increase their productive capacity.

Moreover, as the government’s expenditures increase as a fraction of GDP, a developed country’s GDP growth rate falls. This can be shown empirically with Rahn’s Curve. This curve is a plot of a country’s GDP growth versus government expenditures. Since growth rates are significantly lower for developed economies than for developing economies (indeed, developing economies’ growth rates may actually increase with government expenditures), I will restrict my attention to countries with developed economies. Below is a scatter plot with each dot representing a developed OECD country in the year 2013. The blue line is a linear best fit to the scattered data.

This graph strongly suggests that GDP growth rates become negative once government spending exceeds a little more than 50 percent of GDP.

Even more distressing is what Hauser’s Law teaches us. A version of Hauser’s Law exists for every country with highly progressive income tax rates increasing steeply with income. The more progressive the tax rates, the more the government depends on higher income individuals and companies for most of its tax receipts. Below is a bar chart of the percent of U.S. federal income tax revenue in 2020 gleaned from different income groups. If you do the arithmetic, this graph shows that taxpayers in the top 25 percent in income to the top one percent collectively provide 66.1 percent of federal receipts.

Therefore, if the incomes of higher income people suffer due to low economic growth, federal tax receipts will also decline. Tax receipts are tied to the size of the GDP. The result is Hauser’s Law, which says that federal tax receipts in any year average 19.5 percent of GDP, plus or minus a few percentage points. Below is a plot of Hauser’s Curve from 1945 to 2015, which illustrates the point.

The conclusion is inescapable. The combination of Rahn’s Curve with Hauser’s Law tells us in no uncertain terms the following fact: As government expenditures increase as a fraction of GDP, growth rates decrease. Therefore, government tax receipts will also suffer. If government expenditures increase above approximately 50 percent of GDP, its tax receipts will also decline. In this way, the government will destroy its capability to do anything if it spends too much of the national income. All of this contradicts the Democrats’ Keynesian claim they can create a healthy, growing economy simply by increasing government economic demand.

Item: Progressives assert human emissions of carbon dioxide must be eliminated to halt catastrophic global warming.

This is an assertion progressives have made for decades. They claim that a ridiculously large fraction of scientists publishing articles on global warming (typically in excess of 95 percent) believe in anthropogenic global warming caused by human carbon dioxide emissions. I have rebutted this assertion in two essays: Anti-AGW Global Warming Scholarly References and What Consensus on Anthropogenic Global Warming.

Moreover, I have noted in several essays — most recently in the post The Idiocy of Joe Biden’s Climate Plan — that there are five facts about atmospheric carbon dioxide that conclusively show the following: CO₂ can not possibly be the cause of the observed global warming. A more expansive explanation is provided in The Idiocy of Joe Biden’s Climate Plan , but I list these facts below.

1. Carbon dioxide is an atmospheric trace gas composing a fraction of about 0.0004 of the atmosphere.
2. A carbon dioxide molecule has only three absorption lines for heat radiation, and two of those are in the tail of the Earth’s blackbody distribution.
3. The CO₂ molecule’s infrared excited states have lifetimes longer or comparable to the time it takes for a photon to travel from the surface of the Earth to the top of the atmosphere.
4. Most atmospheric carbon dioxide molecules are totally saturated with infrared photons for most of the time.
5. As CO2 is added to the atmosphere, it has less and less effect on increasing atmospheric temperatures.

The last fact is due the fact carbon dioxide molecules deplete the population of available photons at the appropriate frequencies to excite the molecule to an excited state. Below is a bar chart showing how much the average atmospheric temperature increases as the CO2 atmospheric concentration increases.

All of these well known physical facts about atmospheric carbon dioxide are in marked contradiction to the claims of progressive Democrats.

Item: The Biden administration claims the so-called Inflation Reduction Act actually reduces inflation.

As many people have already noted, the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 has absolutely nothing to do with reducing inflation. The reasons progressive Democrats claim it reduces inflation is that it provides subsidies in Affordable Care Act extensions, and indirect price controls on prescription drugs for Medicare recipients. However, to actually decrease the inflation rate, the nation must increase the supply of needed goods and services and decrease the amount of money chasing them.

However, the act also mandates large increases in government expenditures. These spending increases include $386 billion of spending and tax breaks to battle carbon dioxide emissions. They also include federal investments in non-fossil fuel energy production, tax credits for lowering CO₂ emissions, and tax credits for households to offset energy costs.  All of these federal expenditures will be inflationary because they add to deficit spending. This mandates the sale of federal bonds, which forces the Federal Reserve to increase the money supply to finance them.

There is one more way in which this act adds to the inflation rate. Fundamental economics shows us that the inflation rate is equal to the percent increase in the money supply, plus the percent increase in money velocity, minus the percent increase in the GDP. The so-called Inflation Reduction Act provides for a 15 percent corporate minimum tax rate for companies with incomes higher than $1 billion. In addition, corporation stock buybacks will be charged a 1 percent excise tax. By increasing taxes on companies, the federal government will reduce their ability to increase the GDP. This is fundamentally inflationary.

A Scientific Way To Discover the Truth

All of the examples of progressive Democratic assertions cited above possess a common attribute. They all contain contradictions with commonly and easily available empirical data. Many times the contradictions are massive. It does not take much of a search on the internet to find them.

However, this brings up the question of just which sources of data are to be trusted. Merely being available on the internet is obviously not a guarantee of trustworthiness. An example of such a source I use quite often is the World Bank. I have objections to some of the World Bank’s policies. For example, the World Bank classifies The People’s Republic of China as having a developing economy, despite much evidence to the contrary. Nevertheless, the World Bank’s library of economic data covering almost all countries in the world is generally very reliable. There are two major reasons for making such a judgement.

The first reason is the methods by which the data is collected. For example, if the GDP of each country is measured in the same way, then more than likely their resulting GDPs mean the same thing: the sum of the country’s goods and services produced each year. This does not mean the reported data are error free. Most of the contributing data must necessarily come from the countries themselves, and they might have motives to be less than truthful. Nevertheless, any lying on the part of a country would lead to contradictions with other derived data. The World Bank has published how they attempt to keep their published data as accurate as possible.

The second reason to trust the reported data is its consistency with everything else you know. For example, although the Biden Administration has declared our borders to be secure, we have a very large number of videos showing the exact opposite to be the truth. Also, Biden’s declarations contradict the data provided by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). The CBP reported that in fiscal year (FY) 2020, the last complete fiscal year of the Trump Administration from October 1, 2019 to September 30, 2020, the number of apprehended illegal immigrants were 646,822. In FY 2021, the first fiscal year mostly under Biden, that number jumped to 1,956,519. In light of all this conflicting data, the Biden Administration’s declarations must be considered ridiculous lies.

Sources of (Mostly) Reliable Empirical Data

A necessary condition for using these two methods for determining the truth is the availability of reliable sources of empirical data. In the list below, I give the sources that I most often use. They are all available on the internet.

1. The World Bank: An indispensable source of economic indicators for almost all countries on Earth. These indicators include GDP, per capita GDP, GDP growth, and the Gini Index.
2. The St. Louis Federal Reserve District Bank: Another indispensable source for a vast amount of economic data for the U.S. It is available in the Federal Reserve Economic Data Base (FRED).
3. The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta: This site provides two interesting statistics. The first is called GDPNow, which is their current estimate of U.S. GDP growth for the current quarter. The second is their wage growth tracker, which can be displayed in a number of ways (Full-or-part-time, Job switcher, Industry, Occupation, Wage level, or Hourly workers). The mode that interests me most is Wage level. This displays the 12-month moving average of median wage growth according to income quartile, the first quartile being the lowest in income and the fourth quartile the highest.
4. The Heritage Foundation: Of particular interest on this website are its annually update of its index of economic freedom. I have discussed this index and its method of calculation in the essay A Closer Look at the Index of Economic Freedom. This index for a particular country rates the economic freedom found in it. It is calculated for every country on Earth for which there is data. If the index is zero, then the government completely controls its economy and there is no economic freedom for citizens. If the index is 100, then citizens have complete economic freedom and the government has no control over the economy.
5. The Cato Institute: This organization is an American libertarian think tank. Of particular interest on it is its Human Freedom Index, which are calculated annually for every country on Earth. The Human Freedom index is an arithmetic average of two subindices, the Personal Freedom Index and the Economic Freedom index. The Human Freedom Index is generally consistent with the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom. I demonstrate this in the post How Much Human Freedom Can We Find in the World?

Admittedly, filtering out the truth from the vast amounts of progressive and main stream media gaslighting requires a certain amount of work on your part. You must compare the propaganda of the Left with sources of trusted empirical data. Nevertheless, the sources of empirical data that allow you to do this are readily available on the internet. If you think our country is going in the wrong direction, you have a duty as a voting citizen to find out why.

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