The Senate Leadership Fund (SLF) is a multi-million dollar PAC with major donors straight off the Who’s Who of American CEOs and fellow one-percenters. The organization is run by a former chief of staff to Mitch McConnell, who stands to be the greatest beneficiary of the fund’s big spending if it succeeds in reinstalling him as Senate Majority Leader for the Republicans after next month’s election.
No surprise, given those links to entrenched wealth and power, that the SLF relies on a time-worn playbook. Their attempts to dub working-class advocate Tim Ryan as “Taxing Tim” hark to the decades-old claim that every Democrat is a spendthrift. They count on Americans to have short memories: Bill Clinton achieved four years of budget surpluses, and Joe Biden has reduced the deficit — which skyrocketed thanks to Republicans’ tax cuts for the rich — by nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars in under two years.
Undeterred by reality, ads airing from Colorado to Ohio and Georgia rave about “87,000 IRS agents” extracting “$20 billion” from middle-class taxpayers. This is a deliberate distortion. The non-partisan FactCheck.org reports that these figures are cherrypicked from an “obsolete” Congressional Budget Office (CBO) assessment. With final amendments and directives in place, the updated CBO report firmly refutes claims that The Inflation Reduction Act raises taxes on low and middle income earners.
And Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has directed the IRS to enforce tax collection on the high-earners who have long used devious methods to avoid paying their fair share.
Meanwhile, I’m grateful that Congressman Ryan voted in favor of boosting American manufacturing, diversifying our energy sources, fighting extreme weather, negotiating drug prices, and reducing health care costs. He also supported putting a stop to price-gouging by oil companies. Too bad every Republican in Congress opposed that one, and obstructionists in the Senate wouldn’t even let it come to a vote. Gas prices might have fallen even farther by now if Republicans really cared about the struggles of working people. They also opposed capping the exorbitant prices drug companies charge for life-saving insulin. Tim Ryan voted for that, too, and it’s now law.
These are some of the reasons I support Tim Ryan for US Senate. Voters have sent him to Washington for ten terms in the House of Representatives. Are those Ohioans stupid? And don’t forget — he ran against Nancy Pelosi for Speaker of the House.
Anesa Miller
