Ten Lessons for Tea Baggers

Here are 10 Lessons for Tea Baggers:

1. President Obama Cut Your Taxes
2. The Stimulus is Working
3. First Ronald Reagan Tripled the National Debt…
4. …Then George W. Bush Doubled It Again
5. Republican States Have the Worst Health Care
6. Medicare is a Government Program
7. Barack Obama is Not a Muslim
8. Barack Obama was Born in the United States
9. 70,000 Does Not Equal 2,000,000
10. The Economy Almost Always Does Better Under Democrats

1. President Obama Cut Your Taxes

As in April, the Tea Baggers continued to display their fundamental misunderstanding of U.S. history and the American Revolution. Apparently, the right-wing zealots are outraged by no taxation with representation.

As promised, Barack Obama in the stimulus package delivered on his pledge of tax relief for 95% of American households. Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) didn’t only jump start gross domestic product and refill empty state coffers in the second quarter of 2009. As Nate Silver thoroughly documented, “Obama has cut taxes for 98.6% of working households.”

Nevertheless, raging Tea Baggers spouting Republican Tax Day lies took to the streets not to thank the President, but to blame him for the tax cuts they received.

2. The Stimulus is Working

A prime target of Bagger bashing, the $787 billion stimulus package passed over the near-total obstructionism of Congressional Republicans is already paying huge dividends for the economy.

To be sure, at 9.7% the unemployment rate remains dismal. But the impact of ARRA and other government actions extends well beyond the Obama administration’s claim it has created or preserved one million jobs to date. As I documented in August:

After steep declines of 5.4% and 6.4% in the previous two quarters, gross domestic product fell only 1% in the last three months. And while the ARRA overall added “up to 3 full percentage points of annualized growth in the quarter,” President Obama’s stimulus helped precisely where it was needed most – rescuing devastated state budgets.

Earlier this month, the reliably Republican Wall Street Journal agreed the Obama administration has helped stem the bleeding from the Bush Recession:

Many forecasters say stimulus spending is adding two to three percentage points to economic growth in the second and third quarters, when measured at an annual rate. The impact in the second quarter, calculated by analyzing how the extra funds flowing into the economy boost consumption, investment and spending, helped slow the rate of decline and will lay the groundwork for positive growth in the third quarter — something that seemed almost implausible just a few months ago. Some economists say the 1% contraction in the second quarter would have been far worse, possibly as much as 3.2%, if not for the stimulus.

For the third quarter, economists at Goldman Sachs & Co. predict the U.S. economy will grow by 3.3%. “Without that extra stimulus, we would be somewhere around zero,” said Jan Hatzius, chief U.S. economist for Goldman.

For the remainder of this article go here.