Fact Checkers Bust Ted Cruz For Lies About President Obama’s Economic Record

Ted Cruz is starting his 2016 run off with a bang, earning a big old “false” from PolitiFact on his very first official fact check of the 2016 cycle.

Steve Contorno at PolitiFact took on Senator Cruz’s (R-TX) claim during his 2016 announcement that small businesses were failing at record numbers under Obama, and he was not impressed, writing, “However, as of 2012 (the last year available) the number of business deaths had fallen back to where they were in 2005, 1998 and 1988.”

Reagan was in office in 1988. Just saying. President Obama is on par with Republican God Ronald Reagan. Then we had Bill Clinton in office in 1998, the President fondly remembered for good economic times. 2005 of course was the heady time before the Bush crash, so not a good selling point for Republicans.

Trying to sell the idea of a perfect world if only a conservative were in the White House, Cruz waxed lyrical about the imaginary Fox world that Republicans live in, where all things are awful because Obama:

“Think just how different the world would be. Imagine instead of economic stagnation, booming economic growth. Instead of small businesses going out of business in record numbers, imagine small businesses growing and prospering. Imagine young people coming out of school with four, five, six job offers.”

Yes, imagine if trickle down actually worked! Just believe. This might have been an easy sell at Liberty University, where students were forced (for the liberty) to attend the Cruz announcement. But in the real world, not so much.

And for a view from reality, we have PolitiFact:

Cruz claimed small businesses were “going out of business in record numbers.”

In terms of sheer volume, that was true in 2009, at the height of the recession, though the data only goes back to 1977. However, the total number of closures has since fallen. Data for the most recent year, 2012, shows business closures at about what they were in 2005.

The percentage of firms that closed was quite high in 2009, but it wasn’t the highest point, and more recently, it is in line with historical figures. We rate Cruz’s statement False.

Republicans like to sell their Koch funded agenda for big corporations and the top 2% as good for mom and pops, but that is as false as trickle down. So it’s ironic that Cruz would pretend to care about small businesses. The Republican agenda exists to serve the Waltons of this country, not the every day working family with a small business.

Ted Cruz is still a newbie in the Senate and apparently not used to being fact-checked. Prior to his 2016 bid, even during his government shutdown, he has existed in his happy Fox bubble, ensconced in the epistemic closure that fuels the modern day conservative movement where up is down and black is white.

We all know that Ted Cruz exists for the sole purpose of enriching Ted Cruz, so it’s funny that he’s pretending to care about small businesses. But even more humorous is the fact that his Republican fear mongering earned him a big old false on his first official fact-check by PolitiFact of the 2016 cycle.

Ted Cruz lives in an imaginary world where his flat tax actually makes works and he can just make say stuff and we’ll all believe.