Admit the Truth

For many years I had a sign over my desk that read, “Admit the Truth.” Not “tell the truth,” but admit the truth. Although I hate to make mistakes, and find it even more painful to acknowledge them publicly, I wanted to remind myself that it is better to come clean when you are wrong, than to keep fighting for a falsehood.

I came to this conclusion after witnessing a fight between my father and a favorite uncle. They were arguing about whether soldiers were allowed to bring home money from Europe at the conclusion of World War II. My father insisted that they couldn’t, while my uncle said they could.

After going back and forth for almost a half hour, my uncle finally capitulated and agreed that they could not. What made this interesting was that my father had not served in the military, whereas my uncle fought under General Patton. In other words, my uncle had first hand knowledge, while my father did not.

After observing how my father bullied his way to success, I decided that this was a Pyrrhic victory. It didn’t matter if my uncle yielded. What mattered was who was right. Simply forcing someone to give in would not change the truth. What was more, the truth was likely to determine later events.

And so I concluded that it did not make sense for me to fight for what was wrong either. Once I realized that someone with whom I disagreed was correct, admitting my error and getting on to the next piece of business would save us both grief. Even I would benefit from adding a new bit of knowledge to my stockpile.

All of this is by way of analyzing Barack Obama’s recent speech about how he would address our impending deficit disaster. Almost everyone who has done the math recognizes that the current deficit spending cannot be sustained. They soon realize that the required interest payments alone will eventually swallow up everything else.

Obama, of course, had a few months earlier submitted a budget that increased federal spending. Now he decided that the accounts needed to be brought into balance. This was forced upon him by Rep Paul Ryan’s budget plan. It drastically reduced deficits, mostly by reducing what the government spent.

But Obama would have none of this. Most of his speech was very vague about expenditure cuts. Somehow getting rid of waste, fraud, and corruption would reduce government outlays. Still, the Obama administration had not been able to make much of a dent in any of these despite two plus years in office. Nevertheless, the future would be different.

Where the president’s heart was, however, was in tax increases. He would rescind the Bush tax cuts so that the rich finally paid their fair share. Never mind that under Bush the wealthy were paying a larger share than under Clinton. Never mind that Obama defined the rich as anyone earning over two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

All this raised eyebrows, but the worst part of this plan was that it totally ignored history. Whether under the auspices of Andrew Mellon, John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, or George W. Bush, the evidence was unambiguous. Reducing taxes increased tax-receipts—it did not reduce them.

Indeed, when first Herbert Hoover and then Franklin Delano Roosevelt increased the tax rate on the rich in order to pay for expenditures during the Great Depression, their strategy backfired. Instead of more money flowing into federal coffers, the amount was nearly cut in half.

So low did income tax receipts fall that Roosevelt was forced to nearly double the excise taxes on ordinary Americans. In other words, the rich paid less and the poor paid more. On top of this, with less money available to them, the rich reduced their investments. As a consequence, Roosevelt lambasted them for their selfishness, but they had neither the resources nor the incentive to comply with his demands.

And now it is Obama who is lambasting the wealthy and promising to confiscate more of their incomes. Unable to admit that he is wrong, either he has not read history or he has not understood it. In any event, the truth does not seem to matter to him. Intent on winning reelection, he is more concerned with the bill of goods he can sell the public.

But the truth is the truth, and if it does not bite him in the backside, it is sure to bite the rest of us.

Melvyn L. Fein. Ph.D.

Professor of Sociology

Kennesaw State University