Center Forward, a Democratic super PAC, began airing ads attacking Republican Lee Anderson in Georgia’s 12th Congressional District. The ad targets Anderson for signing the Taxpayer Protection Pledge to Georgia taxpayers. According to independent organizations, the claim levied in the ad is both misleading and false.
The ad suggests that as a Pledge signer, Lee Anderson has pledged to keep “tax breaks for companies that ship out American jobs.” Unfortunately, when the same claim was levied against Pledge signers in 2010, the Associated Press labeled the attack as “one of the wildest claims of the 2010 campaign.” Adding insult to injury, the non-partisan FactCheck.org rated the attacks against the Pledge as “blatantly false.”
As FactCheck.org has noted, “[The Pledge] leaves ample room for the elimination of any number of special tax breaks so long as the overall level of taxation is not increased. To claim that this ‘protects’ a particular provision is simply untrue.” The overall goal of Pledge signers is to reduce the size of the government by focusing on spending alone.
Despite the fact that Center Forward has pledged over $350,000 to Barrow’s campaign this month, Rep. Barrow should denounce this proven false claim so that both he and Anderson can focus on what Georgia voters care most about: curbing rising gas prices, unsustainable government spending, and the looming tax hikes that take effect on January 1st of next year.
“I applaud Lee Anderson for taking the Taxpayer Protection Pledge. Taxpayers in Georgia have clearly shown their displeasure with tax-and-spend policies coming out of Washington, policies that national Democratic organizations champion,” said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform. “The most recent false claims by this group further demonstrates the difficult time national Democrats are going to have defending the Democrat ‘plan’ for economic recovery: higher taxes and more government spending,” continued Norquist.