It’s nearly breathtaking, Tom Sgouros’s audacity in manipulating facts in order to enable his condescending manner of promoting a downright bizarre version of Rhode Island’s political and policy landscape.  Ever the gracious adversary, he takes to RIFuture, today, to insult both his debate opponent on Saturday, Stephen Moore, as well as the organization that put the debate together and gave him a platform for his own point of view.

It takes but a plain reading of his post to see how dishonest a debater he really is.  Consider:

For example, [Moore] made repeated references to the way we “demonize” business owners and tax them at high rates without being able to be specific about what he meant, or to contradict the long list I gave him of tax cuts for rich people we have enacted over the past 20 years. In fact, the number of broad-based tax increases enacted by the state legislature since 1993 is zero, while taxes were cut for rich people in 1996, 1998, 2001 (twice), 2005, 2006 and 2010.

So, the example starts with criticism of Moore for not being “specific about what he meant,” but in the very same sentence, Sgouros exaggerates what he himself had done.  When the archive video is available, I’ll check to make sure I didn’t miss it — and whether Sgouros is being sneaky or just plain lying — but I don’t think he actually said what he meant by “tax cuts for the rich.”  He lists some years when he says something happened, but that’s not really “being specific.”

Indeed, from other things he said on Saturday, I think he’s including things like historic tax credits.  He may also be including the capital gains tax elimination… without noting that it never actually came to fruition.  He may have been even more audacious and counted both the flat tax phase-down and the 2010 tax reform that mainly halted the flat tax phase-down (and wound up increasing taxes).  But again, I can’t tell you, because he simply repeated the years over and over, not the policies.

That’s all before we consider the fact that Rhode Island’s GDP growth outpaced its neighbors during that heady decade of phased-in tax reform and began losing ground when the state began reversing itself on it.

Then there’s this gem, from Sgouros’s post:

Moore even repeated the right-wing shibboleth that raising the minimum wage will make unemployment rise. Now of course he has to claim that, or else go back on years of his writing. Still, it’s an odd thing to baldly make the claim in a state where the minimum wage went up in January and the unemployment rate has just ticked down, a month or two later. Do I think those are cause and effect?  No, not simply, but it is at least consistent with the effects I predict for an increase in the minimum wage. It seems to me that there is a heavier burden on the person who claims that the future will be exactly the opposite of what happened just last month, but Moore does not appear to see it that way.

As I’ve said, I’m very skeptical of the last two months of employment-survey data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but if you look at the establishment survey — jobs based in Rhode Island, linked to actual payroll records — you see that the number of jobs based in Rhode Island (i.e., those that would be subject to the state’s minimum wage laws) went down in March, not up.  Is that “consistent with the effects [Sgouros predicts] for an increase in the minimum wage”?  Or is he just making stuff up?

During the debate, Sgouros and his progressive teammate Sam Bell also made much of the economic health of Massachusetts (even declaring it a greater success story than Texas), but they didn’t seem to know that Massachusetts actually has been cutting taxes since the ’90s.  And even if we accept their absurd premise that the Ocean State has been a haven for conservative tax-cutters for the last 20 years, that doesn’t explain why the state has been in decline for the past century.

I’ll admit, it is tough for an out-of-state debater to take on opponents who spend much more time specifically with the state’s data.  It makes it that much more difficult when the in-state party is willing to make things up and cherry pick statistics in the hopes that his opposition won’t catch the trick.  

In other words, what was most clearly on display Saturday morning was the degree to which Sgouros relies on the ignorance of his readers and his opponents.