2012 Presidential Election

The ignorance of HBO's Bill Maher was oozing from every nook and cranny of his being Friday night. After telling his Real Time audience that the national debt has only gone up by $1.5 trillion under Obama, the host during the Overtime segment actually said, “Mitt Romney we found out made $27 million, only paid 11 percent in taxes” (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary, first relevant section at 4:00): Readers are reminded that this is information just revealed Tuesday and Maher still can't get it right. As NewsBusters reported , Romney in 2009 had Adjusted Gross Income of $21.6 million and paid federal taxes at a 13.9 percent rate. Maher was wrong on both counts. I guess these numbers came out so long ago he couldn't attain the precise ones to put on his index card. As an added bonus, a few minutes earlier at the 1:45 mark, Maher said to Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.): “You were in Congress in the ’90s. You came in in ’89. Clinton came in in ’93. There was a tax, a small tax raise that he put forward that not one Republican voted for. The economy turned around. Turned out that that tax raise really did a lot of good things for the economy.” First of all, that wasn't a small tax increase. At the time it was the largest tax hike in American history. As for it turning around the economy, it had actually been growing since the second quarter of 1991 and was starting to explode by the time Clinton was inaugurated. What Maher and the rest of his liberal colleagues refuse to acknowledge is that the Gross Domestic Product grew by 2.7 percent in the second quarter of 1991 followed by gains of 1.7 percent and 1.6 percent in the next two quarters. Surely, this was not explosive growth by any means, but it signaled that the recession had ended in the first quarter of 1991, an immutable fact supported by the National Bureau of Economic Research, the entity charged with deciding such things.