Kruse Confused: Our State Senator Has Trouble Distinguishing Fact From Fiction

November 21, 2011 - Our state senator Jeff Kruse has often demonstrated a tenuous relationship with objective facts, but rarely has he compressed such extreme factual wrongness in so few words as he did in a single short paragraph from his November 16, 2011, email newsletter. Here's the paragraph in question:

"Finally we get to Congressman DeFazio. Keep in mind this is the man who introduced legislation to tax every bank transaction you make. To be clear this would mean every time you make a deposit, withdrawal or even wrote a check you would pay a tax. The Congressman basically said if DC had more money the problems would be solved. He then went on to say the rich needed to pay their fair share (the theme from the Occupy Wall Street folks). Here is a fact you will never see in the media. If the government confiscated ALL of the assets of the richest 1%, and they could only do it once, the amount of money collected would not run this government for even two weeks. So please tell me how “taxing the rich” solves any problems?”

Senator Kruse makes two claims of fact in this paragraph: (1) Congressman Defazio “introduced legislation to tax every bank transaction you make”, and (2) “If the government confiscated ALL of the assets of the richest 1% … the amount of money collected would not run this government for even two weeks.”

First take Congressman DeFazio's alleged bank transaction tax. This statement is a lie and we are tempted to call Senator Kruse a liar, but that would imply that Senator Kruse deliberately distributed incorrect information. That would be giving him too much credit. (More on this below.)

This particular lie dates back to the 2010 election season when a dirty tricks campaign on behalf of Congressman DeFazio's opponent used right-wing web sites and viral emails to spread the false rumor that Congressman DeFazio was a co-sponsor of a bill to place a 1 percent tax on all financial transactions. This is an outright, unambiguous, shameless lie. Congressman DeFazio is not, and never has been, a sponsor or co-sponsor of any such bill. Senator Kruse was taken in by a deliberately deceptive political dirty tricks campaign targeting naive, low information voters. He could have easily found the truth with a simple Goggle search. Sponsors and co-sponsors of bills in Congress are a matter of public record, and this particular lie was debunked buy several prominent fact-check sites.

Now for the claim about taxing the 1 percent. This particular “fact” goes beyond a simple lie that could conceivable be true in the real world to something that could only be true is some strange alternate universe where the law of cause and effect and the rules of mathematics and have no meaning. A smart fifth grader should have seen the fallacy in this statement, but it eluded Senator Kruse. Here's the fifth grade analysis:

Assuming the extreme case where the top 1 percent have only 1 percent of the wealth*, it's easy to calculate how long the government would operate if the government were to “confiscate” all of the assets of everyone. If the 1 percent pays for two weeks of government, the remaining 99 percent would pay for 99x2 weeks, for a combined total of 200 weeks. That's just under four years! This is obvious nonsense. Our present tax rate takes much less than 100 percent of everyone's assets in four years, but no one (including Senator Kruse, we suspect) thinks that our government and economy is going to collapse into some kind of fiscal singularity in a matter of months.

But it's worse than that. A simple Goggle search reveals that the top 1 percent presently control 37 percent of the national wealth. If 37 percent of the national wealth will pay for 2 weeks of government, 100 percent will only pay for 2x100/37 weeks, or 5.4 weeks. If this were true, with our current tax structure we're only hours away from oblivion. This is a staggeringly silly assertion, but apparently not too silly for Senator Kruse.

The accuracy or inaccuracy of these statements by themselves are important within the context of the current national political debate, but for the citizens of Curry County it raises another more important question: What does Senator Kruse's inability to recognize obvious falsehoods tell us about the his ability to effectively represent us in the State Senate?

We expect our elected representatives to have the skills needed to represent our interests and to find solutions to problems affecting our lives and our community. We expect them to be able to separate fact from fiction and make judgments on our behalf that are grounded in reality. These examples, among others, call into question Senator Kruse's ability in this regard. We believe Senator Kruse honestly thought he was being truthful when he wrote the paragraph in question. It's troubling that he's so easily fooled. His naive, almost child-like acceptance of such obvious falsehoods calls into question his ability to deal effectively with the complexities he faces in the State Senate.

* This assumption itself is obvious nonsense. If the top 1 percent controlled only 1 percent of the national wealth, everyone would have exactly the same wealth and there would be no actual top 1 percent. But for the purpose of this analysis, this is the limiting assumption that produces the longest period that the government could possibly operate based on Senator Kruse's assertion that confiscating all of the top 1 percent's assets would fund the government for two weeks.