Republicans and The Greater Fool

I didn't realize that pretending to be charitable could save a person millions of dollars in taxes every year. But it's worked for Romney. He can promise to give to charity and take the deduction and then not give as much or at all, as this article in Bloomberg News explains.

Fuzzy Math? Voodoo Economics? Flim-Flam? Senate Republicans prove that math that you refuse to look at doesn't actually exist. At what point can you prosecute a political party for covering up the truth? Or for lying? There's a non-partisan report that shows clearly that cutting tax on the very rich doesn't help the economy at all. No wonder they're hiding it.

Information is power. Hiding it gives power to the powerful, who tend to be Republicans and their clients. Republicans prefer the public didn't listen to Nobel Prize economists like Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman. Listen anyway. Make them mad. And vote accordingly.

There is a weird consistency to Republican thought (if I can call it that.) They prefer Americans believe bad science and non-science rather than the best science. They want Americans to ignore what NASA and our top atmospheric scientists have been saying about climate change. They want us to ignore the evidence of Hurricane Sandy. Republicans persist in trusting numbers that don't add up, plans that their candidate won't show, voodoo economic policies that failed disastrously during the Bush years.

There is, in economics, something called the "Greater Fool Theory", which says that you can always sell a product, no matter how bogus, no matter how foul and dangerous, simply by finding someone more foolish than you are, or more ill-informed or gullible, to buy it. To increase the number of greater fools you can also lie.

(As Romney is doing in Ohio and Michigan right now with his ads falsely claiming Obama somehow forced Jeep to send American jobs to China. Obama saved Jeep and Jeep is increasing its hiring in Ohio and Michigan.)