title:  The 7 Biggest Republican Lies About The Economy Torn Apart In Three Minutes (VIDEO)
text: In two-and-a-half minutes, former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich destroys the seven biggest economic lies told by Republicans.In the short video, uploaded to YouTube by MoveOn, Reich uses facts to shred the Republican myth of trickle-down economics.While Republicans tell us that cutting taxes on the rich will spur economic growth and fuel job creation, the economic data tells a very different story. As Reich points out in the video, both Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush cut taxes on the rich, and  nothing trickled down. The result of Republican tax cuts for the rich have been the same across the states. GOP governors like Bobby Jindal and Rick Snyder have driven their states into economic ruin by imposing experimental trickle-down economic policies on citizens, with disastrous results.Along the same lines, Republicans claim that high taxes on the rich are bad for the economy. Yet history shows the opposite is true.Until 1980, taxes on the top earners in the U.S. were 70 percent. It wasn t until Republicans started cutting these tax rates that economic growth began to slow.Reich also tackles the myth that shrinking government creates jobs. The idea that we create jobs by firing people who already have jobs literally defies reason, but that hasn t stopped republicans from pushing it. It doesn t take much to destroy this lie.While republicans were remarkably silent about the national deficit while George Bush was in the White House, it suddenly became earth-shatteringly important on the day President Obama took office.Reich destroys the myth of deficit reduction as a top priority, explaining that the goal is to reduce the debt as a percent of the GDP, something that cannot be accomplished by slashing budgets all over the place.Reich also looks at how the rising cost of health care impacts the budget, busting the GOP myth that programs like Medicare and Medicaid are negatively impacting the economy.What s important to understand in relation to the health care debate is that government programs actually help slow the increase in health care costs for everyone.The right has been attacking social security as a  Ponzi scheme  ever since they figured out that there was a lot of money in the social security fund that they couldn t get their greedy little hands on.Is this true? Of course it s not. As Reich explains in the video, Social security is solvent for the next two-plus decades, and it would solvent for much longer if we lift the income cap.The video would not be complete if it didn t address the lie that lower-income people not paying taxes is horribly unfair to the rich.Watch the video below, courtesy of MoveOn on YouTube: While the video above was released in 2011, Republicans are still using these same debunked economic myths to press their disastrous agenda all across the country.As long as Republicans continue to try to repackage and sell these same old lies at election time, we ll be forced to keep debunking their myths time and time again.Image credit: wikimedia commons, video screen capture via MoveOn 