Fact Checking Bill Maher on the Tea Baggers

In this case, Maher did not need to really stretch the facts to make his point…

In the season opener of Real Time with Bill Maher he took on the idea that the Tea Party Movement is not actually a movement and instead is actually a cult.

That section starts at about the 2:20 mark.

• People in cults believe in ridiculous unattainable goals like “decificit reduction by way of giant tax cuts”
• Cults have their own vocabularies:  Freedom means Guns, Diplomacy means Weakness, Elitist means Reader, and Socialist means Black.
• Cult members attribute all the problems to one person – in the Teabaggers case, this one:

The Problem

A poll showed 90% of Teabaggers thought that taxes had gone up or stayed the same under Obama.  Only two percent thought they went down.  The simple reality is:  for 95% of working families, taxes went down.

Only 2 percent of the people in a movement about taxes and named for a tax revolt, have the slightest idea about what is going on – with taxes.

So, it would be easy to just mock, except that those who fall under the control of cults aren’t necessarily weirdoes, they’re victims. And we shouldn’t forget that these people are our relatives, our neighbors and the folks at the next table in the restaurant. Especially if that restaurant is Hooters and it’s dollar wing Wednesday.

By the way, the poll Maher spoke about is on the CBS News site at Poll Reveals Most Americans Don’t Know They Got a Tax Cut.

Tax Poll Results

The pie chart – while showing an insane amount of ignorance on the part of those polled – doesn’t sound as bad as Maher indicated on his show. Thats because that chart shows ALL partipants. The full text of the article does go on to explain that:

Of people who support the grassroots, “Tea Party” movement, only 2 percent think taxes have been decreased, 46 percent say taxes are the same, and a whopping 44 percent say they believe taxes have gone up.

Those answers must frustrate the president who has highlighted its tax cuts for the middle class in almost every speech.

In his State of the Union address, President Obama said that as part of their economic recovery, his administration has passed 25 different tax cuts.

“Now, let me repeat: We cut taxes,” he said. “We cut taxes for 95 percent of working families. We cut taxes for small businesses. We cut taxes for first-time homebuyers. We cut taxes for parents trying to care for their children. We cut taxes for 8 million Americans paying for college.”

In his Super Bowl Sunday interview with Katie Couric, he touted the tax cuts in the stimulus package: “we put $300 billion worth of tax cuts into people’s pockets so that there was demand and businesses had customers.”