John Oliver explains the wealth gap

John Oliver does a great job, doesn't he?

This strikes home for me, because my 88-year-old mother worries about estate taxes. The fact that she doesn't have any money doesn't seem to matter. Well, she's a Republican, and she's been convinced that she has to worry about this.

(Face it. Even if she were wealthy, she wouldn't have to worry about it. Her heirs might, but not her. As it is, that's the last thing any of us are worried about!)

Also, I hate to break it to you, but you're not going to win the lottery. You might as well stop wasting your money by buying tickets. Certainly you need to stop wasting time wondering what you'll do with your winnings!

Lotteries are just a tax on dumb people. (OK, OK, people lacking in math skills. Is that better?) Rich people don't want to pay an extra dollar or two in taxes, so they take it from the gullible, instead. And then they promote gullibility on television, to promote the damned thing! Don't get me started.

If there's class warfare in America, you and I are losing. Worse than that, you're probably fighting on the wrong side. Somehow, the astoundingly wealthy have convinced ordinary people to support them, instead of themselves.

These days, children are less likely than their parents to graduate from high school. How's that for a sobering statistic? Kids lucky enough to make it to college come out of it with a staggering level of debt. But the wealthy are making out like bandits, thanks to tax cut after tax cut (and corporate welfare, too, to add insult to injury).

Ever since Ronald Reagan, Republicans have been brilliant in convincing poor and middle-class white people that black people and Hispanic immigrants are the problem. Remember those so-called "Reagan Democrats"? They were working-class white people who'd been manipulated into seeing economics in terms of race (thus supporting economic policies which were not in their own best interests).

Yeah, that was stupid, but it worked. Republicans may be piss-poor at governing, but they can sure take advantage of the worst of human nature, when they want votes. They're also great at taking a serious issue, dumbing it down into two words - "class warfare" - and then repeating it in unison.

It's maddening, but plenty of people are gullible enough to believe that sort of thing. And our news media help not at all. Thanks the gods for comedians, huh?

Eliminating tax deductions

(The Cassandra Files)

This is the chart of "top ten individual tax breaks" shown on the Daily Show a couple of weeks ago. I thought it was interesting, so I've been meaning to write about it.

The chart is from the Wall Street Journal, but it's behind a paywall, so I borrowed the image from this blog (which looks excellent - you might check it out). Keep in mind that the WSJ is now owned by News Corp., the parent company of Fox 'News,' so it's even more rabidly right-wing than it used to be. I'm just saying, this is not a liberal presentation.

The topic came up because Mitt Romney has promised to cut income tax rates across the board by 20%, if we're actually dumb enough to elect him president.  That's on top of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, which he wants to make permanent.

He also promises to eliminate taxes on capital gains, to eliminate estate taxes, to cut corporate taxes, to repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax (which was instituted so that wealthy Americans would pay something in taxes, instead of nothing at all, after deductions) - oh, and to greatly increase military spending.

(After all, our only enemies are a rag-tag band of goat-herders using improvised explosives, so spending more than the rest of the world combined on the military just isn't enough, huh? Well, Republicans hate to "throw money" at a problem... unless it's in the Department of Defense. Then, throwing money really starts to make sense to them, apparently.)

Remember, in the Republican primary, all these tax cut promises were popular, because Republicans still have faith in trickle-down economics, despite the complete and utter failure of that during the Bush administration. Indeed, it's been a complete failure for at least thirty years now. But so what? Republicans are faith-based, not evidence-based. They're going to believe whatever they want.

Now that Romney has the nomination, though, it's time to shake that Etch A Sketch again. After all, tax cuts for the rich aren't popular with most of the country. So now, he promises that he won't cut taxes for the wealthy any more than they've already been cut (he'll still make the Bush tax cuts permanent, of course).

Oh, he still says he'll cut their tax rates another 20%, even from today's low rates. He'll still eliminate estate taxes. He'll still eliminate taxes on capital gains. He'll still repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax. But now - just for the general election - he promises to make all that "revenue neutral" by eliminating tax deductions.

There are a couple of problems with that. The first is simply that it makes no sense, even by Republican standards. Republicans claim that cutting taxes on the "job creators" will create a booming economy. Leaving aside the fact that George W. Bush claimed that, too - and that it failed horribly then - Romney is currently claiming that he's going to leave them paying the same amount of taxes that they do now.

So if he's telling the truth,... what's the point? Why expend the political capital to do all that if it's going to leave the wealthy exactly where they are today? Why would the wealthy be so supportive of that?

Even if 'trickle-down' economics were valid, Romney is currently claiming that he'll leave the 'job creators' paying the same taxes they are now. So how will that have any effect at all,... if he actually does what he says he'll do. (Republicans are still backing him because they just assume that he's lying. And he is.)

But the second problem is that Romney refuses to say which deductions he'll cut and that every independent fact-checker says that Romney simply can't do what he's promising. It's mathematically impossible. And there's no way he can even start to make up for the lost revenue without greatly increasing taxes on the middle class (which he also claims he won't do).

Romney keeps changing his position on this, still without giving any details, but none of it adds up. Here's another study about his latest plan. But they're all like that. His plans are all vague - deliberately so - and independent fact-checkers say that they're all mathematically impossible. All of his plans are just attempts to get votes from the gullible, nothing more.

Of course, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan claim that the numbers are there, but they won't give anyone the numbers. Well, please remember that George W. Bush also claimed, when he was running for the presidency, that his tax cut plan wouldn't benefit primarily the rich and wouldn't increase the deficit, both of which turned out to be lies.

Frankly, I can't imagine that anyone would believe the Republicans now, when they claim the exact same thing. I mean, that's just incredible, don't you think? But that's what they're doing.

Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to look at these tax deductions. These are the top ten individual tax breaks for 2014. Obviously, if you're going to eliminate tax deductions in order to make up the billions of dollars lost in Romney's other plans, you're going to have to eliminate these big deductions, not little ones which won't raise much money.

(Disclaimer: Please keep in mind that I'm not an economist, an accountant, or any kind of tax professional. I might get the specifics wrong about some of these deductions, and if I do, I hope you'll correct me. If I make a mistake, I always want to know it.)

The top two deductions, which make up more than a quarter of tax expenditures, are the tax breaks for employer-provided health care and pension plans. In a way, it's true, these aren't fair. Why should a person lucky enough to work for an employer who provides health insurance and a pension plan pay less in taxes than a person who's not so lucky?

Most of those people make more money, too. Jobs at those kinds of companies - union jobs, many of them - tend to be much better jobs. Yet, we make the poor bastards who aren't so lucky pay a higher tax rate? It's not fair. So maybe we should eliminate these deductions.

But these are middle class deductions. They're certainly not going to affect the wealthy, which is what Romney claims he wants to do. And unions negotiated for those benefits in part, at least, because they weren't taxable. Given our tax laws, it just makes sense to get some of your compensation in benefits, rather than just take-home pay that's fully taxable.

And union or not, if you have a health insurance benefit at work, or if you have any kind of pension plan (defined benefit, 401-k, 357 plan, etc. - I'm not sure if this includes IRAs), you probably won't be happy about paying more taxes. Well, maybe that's one reason why Romney is being so secretive about it.

But whether it is or not, eliminating these deductions will primarily affect the middle class, not the wealthy. Cutting the top two deductions will do almost nothing to make up for his many tax cuts which benefit them.

The next biggest deduction is the mortgage interest deduction, and you know how unhappy people would be about losing that! The real estate industry alone would have kittens!

And again, it's primarily a middle-class deduction. That's not entirely the case, I suppose, but the deduction is capped for mortgages - on first or second homes - of $1 million or less. The average person probably doesn't have a million dollar mortgage on a second home, but the super-rich probably can't take advantage of this deduction, either, since it's just one million dollars. (Lucky for them, they have so many other ways to avoid paying taxes.)

This might be the third biggest tax deduction, but I can't see any politician seriously attempting to eliminate it. Even if Romney did propose that, it would never get through Congress. And as I say, it's mostly a middle-class tax deduction anyway. This won't help him do what he claims he's going to do.

To be honest, I'm not sure about the fourth biggest deduction on this list, "exclusion of Medicare." When you're working, Medicare taxes aren't tax deductible. Afterwards, Medicare premiums for Part B (out-patient services) and Part D (prescription drugs) are deductible, but only if your medical expenses exceed 7.5% of your adjusted gross income.

I can't imagine that's one of the biggest tax deductions, and if it were, it wouldn't affect the wealthy at all. So I just don't know. Maybe this category includes Social Security, too? Social Security taxes are only deductible for the self-employed. However, Social Security benefits aren't taxed - which would add up to quite a bit, I'm sure - but that's only for people making less than $25,000 a year ($32,000 for couples filing jointly).

Oh, maybe that's it. Maybe this category just means that Medicare benefits aren't taxed. And there's no income limit on that, either. I guess that's possible, if you really think that Romney would try to tax seniors' Medicare benefits! Heh, heh. He'd be better off angering real estate agents!

But I really don't know about this one. Still, either way, it can't possibly be a deduction which primarily affects the wealthy. And note that Mitt Romney also wants to repeal Romneycare Obamacare, which action would, among other things, cut the Medicare taxes of high-earners. So when it comes to Medicare, he seems to be going in the wrong direction!

And speaking of wrong directions, the fifth biggest tax break is the low tax rates on capital gains. I'm not sure if that category includes qualified dividends, which are also taxed at that low capital gains rate, or not. But either way, Romney plans to eliminate taxes on capital gains entirely! So not only won't he eliminate this tax break, he's going to make it far, far worse!

Indeed, Romney supported Paul Ryan's tax plan, which also did this, and studies showed that would have led to Romney himself paying less than 1% in federal income taxes. Yes, that would be a huge giveaway to the wealthy, and especially to the super-wealthy. Right now, capital gains and qualified dividends are taxed at a very low rate compared to wages, but Romney wants to cut that to zero. So yes, he's definitely going in the wrong direction on this one!

And note that estate tax breaks (#8 on the list) are the same way. Right now, you can receive an estate of more than $5 million and pay no federal tax on that. That's a big tax break, and it does affect the wealthy. (If you expect to receive a $5 million inheritance, you're probably not hurting too badly.)

But far from eliminating this tax break, Mitt Romney plans to remove the cap entirely. Yes, you'll be able to receive your full $100 million inheritance, or $1 billion inheritance, or even more,... entirely tax-free. What, you don't expect to get a $1 billion inheritance? Well, poor you, huh?

Yes, this is another example of Romney moving in the exact opposite direction. You know, he's really going to have to cut deductions to make up for that stuff. (Admit it. You know that this is just talk, right? He has no intention of actually doing what he says.)

The Earned Income Tax Credit, the sixth biggest tax break, applies specifically to low- and moderate-income, working Americans (you must have less than $3200 in investment income), especially those with lots of children. So eliminating this deduction certainly won't affect the wealthy!

But there's something really ironic about this. The Earned Income Tax Credit has long been a favorite of Republicans. Although supported by many Democrats, too, it has really been their plan. It's been expanded many times, most notably in the Reagan Tax Reform Act of 1986.

But one of the results of this has been that many low- and moderate-income Americans pay no federal income taxes at all, and Republicans have recently been screaming about that. Yes, their own plan has resulted in working families with lots of children getting enough tax credit that they pay no taxes. Gee, you never hear Republicans point that out, do you?

(I don't mean to imply that these are the only Americans who pay no federal income taxes. Many senior citizens don't, because Social Security payments aren't taxed, if you don't make a lot of money elsewhere. The combat pay of our soldiers is exempt from federal income taxes. Students and other part-time workers who don't make much money often have no tax liability, because of standard deductions. And the tax rate on capital gains and qualified dividends has been zero in recent years, for the lowest tax brackets - and only 15% maximum at the highest.)

I know that this is getting really long, and I apologize for that. But you're getting the point, I hope. Look at those last three tax breaks on the list - the deductions for income tax paid at the state and local level, child credit allowances, and the deduction for charitable contributions. How likely do you think it will be that Congress would actually eliminate those deductions, even if Romney did push for that (which he won't)?

Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan refuse to give specifics about their plans, because they know that (1) the biggest tax deductions are very popular, (2) most of them affect the middle class more than the wealthy (except those which they specifically plan to keep and even expand), and (3) their numbers don't add up - can't add up.

Look at it this way: If their numbers did add up, they wouldn't be so secretive about it. If the math really did work, they'd be plastering America with the details. That's obvious, isn't it? How could you possibly believe otherwise? They are lying to us, just like George W. Bush did. It worked for Bush, but doesn't anyone in America learn from experience anymore?

But OK, if Romney still claims that his plan will work, let him show us. Mitt, pledge to cut these deductions first, and then - if you really do accomplish what you claim - you can cut tax rates after that. After all, cutting deductions is the hard part. Cutting tax rates is easy. So show us that you actually mean what you say by doing the hard part first.

And if we make a little extra money in the meantime, well, you can start to pay off the deficit (like Bill Clinton was doing, before George W. Bush took over). How does that sound?

Yeah, you hate it, don't you. You hate that plan because you're lying. You're just lying. You know the numbers don't add up, and you have no intent of doing what you claim, anyway. It's just another shake of that old Etch A Sketch, just another way to try to get elected. That's the only thing that really matters to you, isn't it?

Lobbyists working to protect Romney's tax breaks

From Bloomberg:

The largest U.S. private-equity funds and venture capital firms have relied on a five-year, multimillion-dollar lobbying campaign to protect the carried interest tax break that helped drive presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s 2010 effective tax rate below 14 percent.

With the issue gaining attention in this year’s U.S. presidential election campaign, the investment industry is again girding to defend its preferential tax treatment. Blackstone Group LP alone spent $5 million in 2011 lobbying Congress on issues including the tax treatment of carried interest.

“If anything preserves the status quo, it will be the very heavy lobbying campaign,” said Edward Kleinbard, a law professor at the University of Southern California. “There’s no other reason for the subsidy to survive.”

Opponents of the tax rate for carried interest see this as an opportunity to press for change. Romney released his 2010 tax returns on Jan. 24, revealing he paid an effective tax rate of 13.9 percent on income of $21.6 million.

Romney, a former Republican governor of Massachusetts and co-founder of Bain Capital LLC, has come to personify the debate over whether the carried interest paid to private-equity managers should be taxed at the capital gains rate of 15 percent while ordinary income is taxed at rates as high as 35 percent.

Yes, we've got the tax system we do because of intensive lobbying, and because we've let money become absolutely critical in political campaigns. And of course these people are going to lobby fiercely to protect their privileges. What's new, huh?

But I note this article primarily because of this:

Democrats view the carried interest issue as an element of the tax fairness theme that President Barack Obama is highlighting in his re-election campaign. Representative Sander Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, plans to introduce a bill as soon as this week that would tax carried interest at the same rate as regular income, according to spokesman Josh Drobnyk. The bill probably won’t advance in the Republican-controlled chamber this year. ...

The last time the Senate considered a bill that would have increased taxes on carried interest -- in June 2010 -- every Republican voted against it, preventing the bill from advancing. Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska was the only Democrat to oppose the legislation.

Yeah, that's my senator. On the bright side, he's retiring after this year. Unfortunately, he's very, very likely to be replaced by a Republican who's even worse than he is. Just as in the presidential campaign, all four Republicans currently running for the Senate in Nebraska are competing over which one is furthest to the right.

Yeah, in the Republican Party these days, "moderate" is a dirty word - almost as dirty as "compromise." You quite literally can't be too crazy for the GOP these days. The sky's the limit.

But it's also clear that, although the Democrats are far from perfect, there's really no comparison between the parties. Ben Nelson might be nearly indistinguishable from a Republican, but he's an atypical Democrat.

Both political parties are not the same, not even close. And this carried interest tax benefit is just one example of that.

QOTD: the GOP's radical transformation

Quote of the Day:

The nation is still recovering from a crushing recession that sent unemployment hovering above nine percent for two straight years. The president, mindful of soaring deficits, is pushing bold action to shore up the nation's balance sheet. Cloaking himself in the language of class warfare, he calls on a hostile Congress to end wasteful tax breaks for the rich. "We're going to close the unproductive tax loopholes that allow some of the truly wealthy to avoid paying their fair share," he thunders to a crowd in Georgia. Such tax loopholes, he adds, "sometimes made it possible for millionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying 10 percent of his salary – and that's crazy."

Preacherlike, the president draws the crowd into a call-and-response. "Do you think the millionaire ought to pay more in taxes than the bus driver," he demands, "or less?"

The crowd, sounding every bit like the protesters from Occupy Wall Street, roars back: "MORE!"

The year was 1985. The president was Ronald Wilson Reagan.

Today's Republican Party may revere Reagan as the patron saint of low taxation. But the party of Reagan – which understood that higher taxes on the rich are sometimes required to cure ruinous deficits – is dead and gone. Instead, the modern GOP has undergone a radical transformation, reorganizing itself around a grotesque proposition: that the wealthy should grow wealthier still, whatever the consequences for the rest of us. ...

The staggering economic inequality that has led Americans across the country to take to the streets in protest is no accident. It has been fueled to a large extent by the GOP's all-out war on behalf of the rich. Since Republicans rededicated themselves to slashing taxes for the wealthy in 1997, the average annual income of the 400 richest Americans has more than tripled, to $345 million – while their share of the tax burden has plunged by 40 percent. Today, a billionaire in the top 400 pays less than 17 percent of his income in taxes – five percentage points less than a bus driver earning $26,000 a year. - Tim Dickinson

The GOP's payroll tax fiasco

Believe it or not, even Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal is criticizing House Republicans for their stance on the payroll tax cut compromise worked out in the Senate.

Of course, the paper, which is owned by the parent company of Fox News, is just unhappy about the political aspects of it, how this will affect their goal of getting Republicans elected in 2012:

GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell famously said a year ago that his main task in the 112th Congress was to make sure that President Obama would not be re-elected. Given how he and House Speaker John Boehner have handled the payroll tax debate, we wonder if they might end up re-electing the President before the 2012 campaign even begins in earnest.

The GOP leaders have somehow managed the remarkable feat of being blamed for opposing a one-year extension of a tax holiday that they are surely going to pass. This is no easy double play.

Still, when even your own side is criticizing you (and make no mistake, the Wall Street Journal is just as much a propaganda organ for the Republican Party as Fox News), you know there's something wrong!

If Republicans didn't want to extend the payroll tax cut on the merits, then they should have put together a strategy and the arguments for defeating it and explained why.

But if they knew they would eventually pass it, as most of them surely believed, then they had one of two choices. Either pass it quickly and at least take some political credit for it.

Or agree on a strategy to get something in return for passing it, which would mean focusing on a couple of popular policies that would put Mr. Obama and Democrats on the political spot. They finally did that last week by attaching a provision that requires Mr. Obama to make a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline within 60 days, and the President grumbled but has agreed to sign it.

But now Republicans are drowning out that victory in the sounds of their circular firing squad. Already four GOP Senators have rejected the House position, and the political rout will only get worse.

I thought a couple of things here were particularly funny. The first is this:

Their first mistake was adopting the President's language that he is proposing a tax cut rather than calling it a temporary tax holiday. People will understand the difference—and discount the benefit.

Funny, but I'm pretty sure I never heard the Wall Street Journal call the Bush tax cuts, which were also scheduled to last for just a set period of time, a "temporary tax holiday." I wonder why not?

The other point is better made by TPM than me:

A mostly irrelevant side note to the Wall Street Journal editorial everyone’s talking about is that they don’t seem to know what policy they’re talking about.

“House Republicans yesterday voted down the Senate’s two-month extension of the two-percentage-point payroll tax holiday to 4.2% from 6.2%,” the editors wrote. “They say the short extension makes no economic sense, but then neither does a one-year extension. No employer is going to hire a worker based on such a small and temporary decrease in employment costs, as this year’s tax holiday has demonstrated.”

They seem to have their payroll tax cuts mixed up. The two percent holiday that’s been in effect for the past year, and the extension Congress is fighting about right now, are both to employees’ share of the Social Security FICA tax. The theory behind the policy is that by increasing worker take-home pay, the cut provides suffering consumers with additional purchasing power, and thus stimulates demand, which is exactly what this sluggish economy needs.

Earlier in the year, President Obama proposed broadening this tax cut to include the employer share of the Social Security FICA tax. That policy operates on the theory that reducing cost-per-employee will create the incentive for job creation. It’s a weaker theory — a lot of big employers are already sitting on a bunch of cash, but aren’t hiring because they don’t have enough customers (see above about demand). But this is what the Wall Street Journal’s editors seem to think has been going on all year — and they’re completely wrong.

You might be surprised that the Wall Street Journal got something this simple wrong, but if you think of them as the newspaper equivalent of Fox News, I'm sure you'll understand it.

PS. Note that this payroll tax cut does not affect the financial soundness of the Social Security Trust Fund. You hear that sometimes, but it's a complete lie, since the fund will get the same amount of money, either way.

The Democrats had proposed paying for it with a "millionaire surtax" - a small tax increase on that amount of a person's income which was above a million dollars a year (only on that part in excess of $1 million per year, note), and of course Republicans wouldn't stand for taxing the wealthy. But even the compromise made up the cost of this payroll tax cut to Social Security.

This would not weaken Social Security at all!

Who to tax? The poor!

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The really funny thing about this claim that 47% of households pay no taxes is that it's false. They may have paid no federal income taxes last year, in the middle of the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression (and after the Bush administration lowered the lowest tax rate for dividends and capital gains to 0% - yes, that's ZERO - the last few years*).

But taxes? Everyone pays taxes. And even if you restrict it to federal taxes, things actually look a lot differently than what you're hearing on Fox "News." From David Leonhardt:

Income taxes aren’t the only kind of federal taxes that people pay. There are also payroll taxes and capital gains taxes, among others. And, of course, people pay state and local taxes, too.

Even if the discussion is restricted to federal taxes (for which the statistics are better), a vast majority of households end up paying federal taxes. Congressional Budget Office data suggests that, at most, about 10 percent of all households pay no net federal taxes. The number 10 is obviously a lot smaller than 47.

The reason is that poor families generally pay more in payroll taxes than they receive through benefits like the Earned Income Tax Credit. It’s not just poor families for whom the payroll tax is a big deal, either. About three-quarters of all American households pay more in payroll taxes, which go toward Medicare and Social Security, than in income taxes. 

But why are people talking of raising taxes on the rich?

The answer is that tax rates almost certainly have to rise more on the affluent than on other groups. Over the last 30 years, rates have fallen more for the wealthy, and especially the very wealthy, than for any other group. At the same time, their incomes have soared, and the incomes of most workers have grown only moderately faster than inflation.

So a much greater share of income is now concentrated at the top of distribution, while each dollar there is taxed less than it once was.

Thanks to our misguided economic policies, at least since Ronald Reagan, the wealthy have made out like bandits, while the rest of us have been treading water. The wealthy simply have a bigger share of the wealth than they did decades ago. And thanks to tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy, they pay less in taxes now, too.

But this can't be right. Why would Fox "News" and right-wing talk radio personalities constantly harp on this tax issue? It couldn't have anything to do with their own tax brackets, could it? Glenn Beck** made $32 million in the past year. Sarah Palin has made $12 million just since last July, one hundred times what she was making as governor of Alaska. (Is it any wonder that she quit halfway through her first term?) Rush Limbaugh, of course, beat them both with an income of at least $54 million annually.

So why are those radio and television talk show hosts spending so much time arguing that today’s wealthy are unfairly burdened? Well, it’s hard not to notice that the talk show hosts themselves tend to be among the very wealthy.

No doubt, like the rest of us, they don’t particularly enjoy paying taxes. They are happy with the tax cuts they have received lately. They would prefer if other people had to pick up the bill for Medicare, Social Security and the military — people like, say, firefighters, preschool teachers, computer support specialists, farmers, members of the clergy, mail carriers, secretaries and truck drivers. 

It's not too surprising that it's these same wealthy blowhards who are scaring people about estate taxes - archly renamed "death taxes" - either, is it? Very few of the people they're scaring have estates large enough to worry about federal taxes, but people are just too ignorant or too dumb to understand the truth.

* Don't you wish you lived on investment income? Unlike wages, which are always taxed at the full rate, the maximum rate for qualified dividends and long-term capital gains is 15%, and they're currently tax-free for anyone in the 10% and 15% tax brackets. Basically, if you work for a living, you get shafted.

** Of course, Glenn Beck of Fox "News" told Forbes magazine, "I could give a flying crap about the political process,... We're an entertainment company." So he apparently feels that his viewers are entertained when he lies to them. Caveat emptor.