Organizations: Heritage Foundation

Conservatives For Class Warfare

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Ask someone what conservatives have in common and you’re likely to hear something about cutting taxes. As it turns out, the modern conservative movement would like to see taxes increased on one very specific group of people: struggling Americans who owed no federal income taxes in the aftermath of the Wall Street collapse. At the same time, conservatives insist that the jobless prefer government handouts to honest work. Though they decry any attempt to raise marginal tax rates on the wealthiest as some sort of attack on success, it appears conservatives are the ones waging class warfare.

“The New Republican Orthodoxy”: Raising Taxes On The Poor

Heritage Foundation Portrays Those Who Pay No Income Taxes As “The Non-Taxpaying Public” Who “Paid Nothing.” From the Heritage Foundation: “One of the most worrying trends in the Index [of Dependence on Government] is the coinciding growth in the non-taxpaying public. The percentage of people who do not pay federal income taxes, and who are not claimed as dependents by someone who does pay them, jumped from 14.8 percent in 1984 to 49.5 percent in 2009. This means that in 1984, 34.8 million tax filers paid no taxes; in 2009, 151.7 million paid nothing.” [Heritage.org, 2/8/12]

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U.S. Chamber Of Commerce: “Shelley Berkley, In The Wrong Corner For Small Business In Nevada”

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An ad from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce targets Rep. Shelley Berkley (D-NV) for supporting health care reform and clean energy legislation. The ad asserts that the Affordable Care Act “hurts small businesses,” citing as evidence a Gallup survey of small business owners that, in fact, contains no mention of the health care law. Of course, the Chamber’s misrepresentation of ACA is predictable considering that health insurers paid it more than $100 million to oppose reform. The ad’s demonization of a clean energy bill supported by Berkley is similarly problematic, relying on a biased analysis from the right-wing Heritage foundation to exaggerate the legislation’s potential impact on Nevada families.

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Crossroads GPS: “Show”

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A Crossroads GPS ad attacks Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) by tying him to President Obama’s agenda, in the process leaving viewers with the wrong picture of the deficit-reducing Affordable Care Act and the American Jobs Act, the latter of which would have been financed by a surtax on millionaires. The ad also misleads on Brown’s vote to invoke cloture on an early version of climate change legislation, failing to mention that he was joined by a majority of Senate Republicans and relying on analysis from the conservative Heritage Foundation to represent the bill as a job-killer.

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Heritage’s Feulner: Dems Want To Eliminate Independent Churches, Boy Scouts, And Little League

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In a June 18 interview with CNSNews.com’s Terry Jeffrey, Heritage Foundation president Ed Feulner said:

Well, and one of the things right now, without getting involved in partisan politics, but one of the things that really concerns me is so many people here in Washington, whether it’s Pelosi and Harry Reid and the Congress, or, frankly, whether it’s this president, what they want to do is take all the intermediate institutions between the federal government on one side and the individual on the other side, just eliminate them. They think that — well, this cartoon feature that Obama’s put out on Julia, where Julia starts out with prenatal care in the womb and goes through Head Start and government-subsidized schools and government-subsidized college tuition all the way through her life, always depending on the government. They don’t want — they don’t want independent churches, they don’t want the Boy Scouts or the Girl Scouts, or the local little league to be out there. They want everything to be controlled by the government. And that’s not, that’s not what the American spirit’s really all about, Terry.

Crossroads GPS: “Obama’s Promise”

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An ad from Crossroads GPS features clips of President Obama describing his policies and accuses the president of breaking his promises to the American people. However, Crossroads’ attempt to use Obama’s words against him backfires, as the ad repeatedly misrepresents the facts about the president’s record.

Read more after the jump.