GOP’S TALKING POINTS STRETCH CREDULITY

The Tennessee GOP fog machine is working overtime this election season — if you think misinformation is fine fiddle.

Like good Southern churchgoers, the Republican General Assembly incumbents and wanna-bes have turned to the same page in their hymnals and are trying to sing in four-part harmony.

One after another, they talk about Tennessee being “in a good place,” or “on tremendous trajectory,” or “on a good run.”

A favorite — hallowed, even — touchstone is how much Tennessee (read here: each incumbent) has done to roll back the Hall income tax and make Tennessee “a low-tax state.”

Tennessee has long lauded the fact that it has no income tax on wages. In recent years, the state has decreased its Hall income tax on interest and dividend income. In other words, our state has begun giving its own tax break to the rich.

Instead, according to Intuit Inc. (the maker of Turbotax), Tennessee has the second highest sales tax in the country, and The Atlantic Magazine in 2015 dubbed Tennessee’s taxation method “the most regressive tax system in the country” because we structured our tax codes to place the highest burden on middle and lower-income families. Adding insult to injury, many luxury items in the Volunteer State are tax-free: attorneys’ fees, haircuts, massages, goods for horses and airplanes, for instance.

While Tennessee’s rich get richer, we have the highest bankruptcy rate in the country, 553 filings per 100,000 residents — most in Memphis and Chattanooga. Why? Low median income and inadequate access to health insurance.

But our GOP incumbents just amp up the volume on their Tennessee-is-so-good hymn.

District 27’s four-year incumbent Patsy Hazlewood recently waxed poetic about Tennessee being in “a good place” with historic lows in unemployment (93 of 95 counties with an unemployment rate below 5 percent), almost 3,500 fewer state government employees than in 2011, a $6,801 rise in per capita income since 2011, the nation’s second best pension-funded ratio, a rare AAA bond rating, fastest improving K-12 schools in the country.

Let’s tease this apart a bit. Tennessee’s jobless rate is low, but not as much as U.S. average.

There’s also the problem of the state’s opioid crisis, which keeps many employees away from work or from seeking work. Does that mean those great unemployment numbers are really bogus? Hazlewood says the state made a start earlier this year with the passage of two bills to help stem the opioid crisis, but next year’s General Assembly needs to “tweak” them.

Further, despite the faster rate of job growth in our state, weekly manufacturing pay in Tennessee averaged $843.66 a week, or 6.4 percent less than the U.S. average factory pay of $902. Bill Fox, an economist at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, told the Tennessean: “When you get a [jobless] rate that low, it means everyone who has skills and wants a job, has one or can find one easily.”

In Tennessee, that’s a two-edged sword. New and existing employers all over the state are frustrated because they cannot find a well-prepared workforce. Even Hazlewood had to acknowledge: “We’re not being honest or fair if a [high school] diploma is not worth the paper it’s written on.” Translation: the “fastest improving K-12 schools” is a measure entirely relative to the starting point of nearly dead-last in the nation.

As for the “rare AAA bond rating,” it’s true that in May 2016, the S&P raised Tennessee’s bond rating from AA+ to AAA. That means our state can borrow money more cheaply. But it’s really only a plus if we borrow, and we as a state don’t. According to a hymnal handout from state Sen. Bo Watson, a 14-year incumbent, “under a common sense, conservative-minded legislature, Tennessee has had success in … keeping our debt low.” The handout continues: “In a recent report, Tennessee debt and pension liability was lowest in the nation.”

And by the way, we keep increasing our state’s “rainy day fund” and have almost five times the cash needed to cover short-term liabilities.

The handout also addresses the $6,801 per capita personal income rise between 2011 and 2017. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ CPI inflation calculator, that really amounts to a raise over those six years of $2,099.

As for services: What services? Like expanded Medicaid to help all Tennesseans have access to insurance?

Rep. Mike Carter, our five-year incumbent representative from Ooltewah, says “expansion of TennCare [Medicaid] will bankrupt the state of Tennessee.”

But only in Republican math can an estimated $300 million-a-day addition to Tennessee’s revenue — $22.5 billion that we could have received from 2013 to 2022 if we bought in to the Affordable Care Act — be computed as something that would bankrupt the state. And did we mention that the $22.5 billion is money we American taxpayers have already paid in federal income taxes?

But please turn in your hymnals to GOP page 666: Things are so good in Tennessee.