Many narratives posited by progressives are popular because they are simply phrased and easily repeated. However, the answers to a few simple questions can demonstrate that those narratives lack a basis in fact. If you are willing to put what you think you know to the test, answer the following questions and see if the narratives hold true.
Narrative: The minimum wage is good for all workers. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that because of the minimum wage, 800,000 people will be lifted above the poverty threshold.
Question: What is the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of the effect on employment of a $15 an hour minimum wage as proposed in the Raise the Wage Act of 2021?
A. 1.5 million jobs created
B. 800,000 jobs created
C. 800,000 jobs lost
D. 1.4 million jobs lost
Answer: D. The minimum wage may help some people rise up out of poverty, but it will cause a much larger number of people to lose their jobs. That definitely is not good for all workers.
Narrative: There is a significant income inequality between the highest earners and the lowest earners in the United States.
Question: How much do the top 20% of earners in the United States make compared to the bottom 20% after taxes and transfer payments ?
A. The top quintile makes 3.8 times the income of the bottom quintile
B. The top quintile makes 7.7 times the income of the bottom quintile
C. The top quintile makes 10.6 times the income of the bottom quintile
D. The top quintile makes 17.1 times the income of the bottom quintile
Answer: A. The average household in the top 20% pays $109,125 in taxes and is left, after taxes and transfer payments, with $194,906. That is only 3.8 times as much as an average household in the bottom 20% which would have income after taxes and transfer payments of $50,901.
Question: Accounting for taxes and transfer payments, what has happened regarding income inequality in the United States over the last 50 years from 1967 to 2017?
A. Income Inequality Decreased by 7%
B. Income Inequality Decreased by 3%
C. Income Inequality Increased by 7%
D. Income Inequality Increased by 20%
Answer: B. Despite claims of worsening income inequality, the facts actually show that income inequality has been decreasing over time. Further, both income inequality and the wealth gap decreased from 2016 through 2019.
Narrative: Wealthy taxpayers don’t pay their fair share of taxes.
Question: In 2018 (the latest year for which data is available), the top 1% of taxpayers earned what approximate percentage of income in the United States?
A. 10%
B. 20%
C. 40%
D 50%
Answer: B. In 2018, the top 1% of taxpayers earned 20.9% of the total United States income.
Question: In 2018, the top 1% of taxpayers paid what percentage of the total federal income taxes?
A. 10%
B. 20%
C. 40%
D. 50%
Answer: C. In 2018, the top 1% paid 40.1% of the total United States income taxes while the bottom 50% paid 2.9% of the total United States income taxes.
Question: What effective federal income tax rate is applied to the top 1% of earners?
A. 10%
B. 15%
C. 20%
D. 25%
Answer: C. In 2018, the top 1% of taxpayers averaged a 25.4% individual income tax rate, which is more than seven times higher than taxpayers in the bottom 50%, who paid at an average rate of 3.4%.
Although there can be genuine debate about what tax rates are appropriate, the taxes paid by the top 1% are significant. The top 1% earn 20% of the income in the United States, but pay 40% of the nation’s federal income tax. The top 1% also pays taxes at a rate that is nearly 7.5 times the rate paid by the bottom 50%. Those figures demonstrate that the taxes paid by the wealthy are not patently unfair.
Narrative: President Biden’s infrastructure plan is great for the economy.
Question: The Biden administration has said that the “American Jobs Plan” is going to bring millions of jobs to the economy. Approximately, how many jobs is President Biden’s “American Jobs Plan” projected to create?
A. 2.7 Million
B. 7.5 Million
C. 12.4 Million
D. 19.1 Million
Answer: A. White House officials have said that the proposal will bring 19 million jobs; however, that number is not quite accurate. The “American Jobs Plan” will only bring 2.7 million jobs on its own while the rest of the economy is expected to create 16.3 million jobs even without the passage of the plan.
Question: Approximately, how much will the total output of the United States economy be affected by the “American Jobs Plan?”
A. Increase of 5%
B. Increase of 1%
C. Decrease of 1%
D. Increase of 5%
Answer: C. By 2031, experts at the Wharton school of business project that the size of the economy’s total output will have shrunk by 0.9 percent as a result of the American Jobs Plan. The reason for that decrease in the economy is the secondary effects of higher government debt and higher taxes.
Thus, the Biden Administration’s “Jobs Plan” has been overly exaggerated and will actually be a long term disadvantage for the US economy.
Voter Laws
The Narrative: Georgia’s new voting law, which requires voter identification for mail-in ballots and set rules regarding early voting, is “racist” and out of sync with laws in the rest of the country.
Question: How many states had laws requesting or requiring voters to show some form of identification at the polls that were in effect at the end of 2020?
A. None
B. 11
C. 25
D. 36
Answer: D. Thirty six states, including North Carolina whose law was upheld by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in December 2020, have voter identification laws.
Question: According to a 2016 Gallup Poll, what percentage of non-whites support voter identification laws?
A. 22%
B. 33%
C. 55%
D. 77%
Answer: D. In the Gallup Poll, 77 percent of non-white respondants and 80% of respondents of all races supported voter identification laws. It is difficult to characterize a policy that is supported by an overwhelming majority of people of every race as being racist.
Question: How many days of early voting does Delaware (Joe Biden’s home state) and Georgia have, effective for the 2022 elections?
A. Delaware 17 Days, Georgia 0 Days
B. Delaware 17 Days, Georgia 10 Days
C. Georgia 17 Days, Delaware 0 Days
D. Georgia 17 Days, Delaware 10 Days
Answer: D. Georgia has 17 days of early voting and Delaware has 10. You get partial credit for C, because in the 2020 election, Delaware did not have any days of early voting. Joe Biden really can’t criticize Georgia’s new law because his home state of Delaware provides fewer days of early voting.
Narrative: Due to the prevalence of shootings of unarmed black people by police, the police are systemically racist and should be defunded.
Question: In 2020, how many unarmed people of all races were killed by police?
A. 7
B. 80
C. 287
D. 1,497
Answer: B. Of the 80 people, 31 were white, 27 were black, and 15 were Hispanic. All of those deaths are tragic and we should do everything we can to reduce them.
Question: Since the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, the number of police killings of unarmed black people have:
A. Increased by 200%
B. Increased by 100%
C. Stayed the Same
D. Decreased by 50%
Answer: D. The number of unarmed black people that were killed by police was 64 in 2014 and 78 in 2015. In contrast, the number of unarmed black people killed by police was 28 in 2019 and 27 in 2020. Although this progress is hopeful, there is more that can be done.
Question: Since the death of George Floyd and the subsequent protests in Minneapolis, what has happened to the homicide rate?
A. Decreased by 50%
B. Decreased by 20%
C. Stayed the Same
D. Increased by 70%
Answer: D. In Minneapolis, the number of homicides has increased from 48 to 82 last year (70 %) and gunshot wound victims increased from 269 to 551 (105%) compared to 2019. Similar increases have happened in other cities, causing some to rethink defunding the police.
Question: Approximately, what percentage of black people would like to see the same or more police activity within their communities?
A. 80%
B. 60%
C. 40%
D. 20%
Answer: A. A 2020 Gallup Poll showed that 81% of black Americans want to see more or the same amount of policing in their communities. The reason would seem obvious, black people are significantly more likely to be victims of crime. In the United States in 2019, there were 7,484 homicides of black people. That represents 54% of all homicides which is significant because black people represent about 13% of the population. The call by affluent, mostly white, progressives to defund the police will have a disproportionate impact on the poor and on minorities. Often, the first thing to be cut from police budgets is training. That training is a large part of the solution to police killings of unarmed people. Rather than defunding the police, a better narrative is that we need to fund better policing.
Narrative: The filibuster is racist and must be abolished.
Question: President Biden stated that “last year alone, there were five times [as] many” uses of the filibuster than in the past and indicated that the filibuster is “being abused in a gigantic way.” How many times did each party use the filibuster in 2020?
A. Republicans 15: Democrats 56
B. Republicans 1: Democrats 327
C. Republicans 174: Democrats 70
D. Republicans 300: Democrats 33
Answer: B. That number of uses of the filibuster is somewhat deceiving because it only measures the number of cloture votes used. A large number of those cloture votes are on judicial nominees and are also of votes that invoke cloture ending debate and permitting a vote to begin. This is however, the measure that President Biden was using in his statement. The Democrats were able to keep five Republican proposals from advancing to a vote in the Senate where those proposals would have passed.
Question: Which party filibustered a bill proposed by a black Senator to address policing issues regarding minorities and to make lynching a federal crime?
A. Republicans
B. Libertarians
C. Democrats
D. Socialists
Answer: C. The Democrats blocked Senator Tim Scott’s JUSTICE Act from being voted on. The JUSTICE Act would have restricted no-knock warrants, encouraged bans on chokeholds, increased use of body cameras, developed a database of police discipline records, made lynching a federal crime and directed the Justice Department to develop and provide training on deescalation tactics.
The Democrats also filibustered two COVID-19 relief bills (one in the spring and one in the fall) and the Born Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act which would have requried that babies which survive abortions be provided with medical care. All of those bills had sufficient votes to otherwise pass the Senate. The filibuster isn’t racist (despite the Democrats filibustering a law making lynching illegal in 2020), rather, it is merely a mechanism that is about, in the prior words of Joe Biden, “engendering compromise and moderation.”
If the answers to my questions are correct, just maybe, the narratives are wrong. At the very least, the facts are more complicated and the issues more nuanced than the narratives suggest. Let’s discuss the facts and debate the issues rather than just restating the narratives.