Inner curmudgeon #2: Bring back censorship

I grew up in the days of censorship, back when it was sex that got people upset. Movie censors wouldn't allow a man and a woman to be in bed together, even with pajamas tightly buttoned to the neck, and even if the actual actors were married to each other in real life. The horror !! It might give the young people ideas. We're not even talking about nudity. This was when you couldn't show any leg above the knee and nothing more than a hint of cleavage.

Of course, Jane Russell's phenomenal chest development was just there, no matter how many layers of clothes she had on. And Lana Turner in a sweater? You just couldn't get much sexier than that. Countless teen-age boys could see right through those clothes in their imaginations.

No, it's not this kind of censorship that my inner curmudgeon wants to bring back. What I have in mind wouldn't try to control people's imaginations. It would be to impose some standards on what's accepted as truth -- no, let's go further -- what's accepted as fact.

I want there to be some universal loud buzzer that goes off every time a politician or preacher or pundit willfully misstates the facts. We don't even have to delete the statement -- just identify it as false right then and there, not later in some article that few people read.

The AJC has a version of this in its "Truth-O-Meter," a daily feature that investigates the truth of a statement made by such a person, and then they rate it on a true/false meter. Of course, this often appears a week later to a different audience. I want an immediate, on-the-spot buzzer that goes off to alert the listener in real time -- and to shame the liar, right then and there.

But the "Truth-O-Meter" is better than nothing. Here are two from recent days, both from Georgia Congressional Representatives -- both Republicans, as it happens, although the Dems are not immune. They just do it less often, less blatantly, and from less scurrilous motives.

1. In a 45 minute lecture to House members during the debate over the deficit, Rep. Paul Braun said that FDR sent his advisers to study socialism with Stalin so he could replicate it in the U.S.

Totally false, with hardly a traceable connection to the facts. AJC contacted Braun's office and even the book they cited as source didn't say what he said. When contacted, the book's author did say that some of FDR's advisers on The New Deal had, years earlier, studied the socialist experiment going on in Russia back during the 1920's, long before FDR was elected and long before Stalin's despotic purges were known. But FDR didn't send them to Russia. She also likened the intelligentsia's interest in socialism in the 1920s to our current, legitimate interest in China's economic developments. Braun's statement is false on the face of it, and misleading in its implications. It got a 0 on the Truth-O-Meter. Shame on Paul Braun, a serial liar -- and read into the Congressional Record at that.

2. Rep. Tom Graves put out a tweet claiming that America's wealthiest 25% pay 86%, and the wealthiest 5% pay 60%, of the total income taxes paid. AJC had to give this a 100% true rating, but went to lengths to point out how it misleads -- and you can bet it was willful misleading, because the tweet is obviously a rebuttal to the Dems correctly pointing out the increasing disparity between the soaring income of the top 5% and the static or declining income of the middle class, leading to the greatest class income disparity since the 1920's.

Here is what makes this so misleading. There are two types of federal taxes on individuals: the income tax and the payroll tax. Most of what wealthy individuals pay is income tax, while a much bigger chunck of what lower and middle income inividuals pay is payroll tax. Payroll tax is levied only on the first $106,000 of income; so a wealthy person pays no more of that than a middle class person. In addition, payroll tax is levied only on earned income, i.e. wages for work. Someone whose income is solely from investments pays no payroll tax, while a person of low income may pay no income tax but still pay payroll taxes.

So, if you mention only income tax, Graves' statement is correct. But if, like Michele Bachmann, you simply say that wealthy pay that percent of federal taxes, then you are incorrect. And most people hearing Graves' claim would not make that distinction; hence it's misleading.

For example, the top 1% did in fact pay 39.5% of all federal income tax in 2007; but they paid only 28% of all federal taxes in 2007.

It's good to have these belated corrections, but I want that immediate loud buzzer -- or maybe even the old-fashioned, vaudeville big hook that pulls poor performers off stage. Maybe some young IT genius could come up with a computer program that would automatically measure the factual truth of these statements and activate the Big Buzzer.

My inner curmudgeon does not like having this kind of slipperiness with the truth from our politicians, preachers, and pundits. Let there be a Big Buzzer in the sky to zap these liars -- the preachers, the politicos, and the pundits, all.

Ralph