Aeschylus’ observation, “in war, truth is the first casualty,” would be as accurate if “war” were replaced by “politics.”

Particularly during Recallarama. As noted Wednesday, the public employee unions and their Democratic toadies (or vice versa) aren’t telling voters the real reasons they’re trying a coup d’état against the Walker administration and Republicans is because (1) they didn’t and don’t like the Nov. 2 election results and (2) they’re annoyed at having to pay more for their health insurance and pensions (even though they’re still paying less and getting more than the 85 percent of taxpayers who are paying for those benefits without collecting government paychecks).

And as noted Tuesday, the public employee unions and their Democratic toadies are, to put it as charitably as possible, mistaken when they claim that the Walker administration and the GOP deliberately withheld their intention to restrict public employee collective bargaining. (Either that, or there is a major literacy problem among Wisconsin’s teachers.)

As Christian Schneider pointed out Wednesday, the unions “knew the collective-bargaining issue was provocative enough to get between 15,000 and 20,000 people per senate district to sign recall petitions (about 10 percent of each district’s population), but not enough to get any of their candidates elected. Unions know the people who signed recall petitions are already in their pocket — they had to quickly change gears and return to the more traditional Democrat talking points, in order to garner independent votes.”

That is why you are being barraged by ads paid for Democrats’ various apparatchiks making claims that range between “mischaracterization” and “falsehood.” Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce — which represents private-sector employers, who employ the vast majority of Wisconsin workers — has assembled a list of claims that don’t stand up to scrutiny, including:

FICTION. The new state budget increases taxes on families, while giving tax breaks “to corporations and the super rich.”

FACT. Recent budget legislation does not increase income, sales, or excise taxes, and it effectively freezes local property taxes.

Indeed, because the income tax is “indexed” for inflation, typical low- and middle-income taxpayers—those with incomes up to $70,000—will get small tax cuts, as they do every year. During the 2009 tax-filing season, those cuts averaged over 2%.

The “tax breaks” referred to cut taxes this year by $80 million. That is just 0.6% of general state tax collections expected for the year. Next year that percentage is still under 1%. These figures are trivial compared to the $3 billion in tax and fee increases enacted to cover the four years ending this past June.

The largest tax cut is an income tax deduction for hiring new employees (jobs!); the second largest merely follows federal law and allows those with health savings accounts to make tax-free deposits to those accounts—hardly the “super rich.” The third largest does not cut taxes at all but merely delays payment of capital gains taxes.

The response to the additional claim that tax breaks are going to out-of-state corporations is that said out-of-state corporations are some of the biggest employers in this state. Raise business taxes, and to summarize, nothing good happens.

This next two illustrate major flaws in the 2011–13 state budget:

FICTION. The 2011-13 budget drastically cuts state spending, which can only harm public services.

FACT. The new general fund budget spends $29.0 billion over the next two years. Comparable state spending during 2009-10 was $12.8 billion and is estimated at $14.2b for the year just ended for a two-year total of $27.0 billion. Thus, due largely to Medicaid, state general fund expenditures are rising by $2 billion, or 7.6%. Yes, many programs had to be reduced, but, overall, the budget did not see a “drastic cut.”

FICTION. The new state budget puts dedicated state employees on the street.

FACT. With selected program reductions and state government reorganization, some job positions were eliminated. But, overall, state positions paid for with state tax dollars increased over last year’s base by 13.

These are flaws because the state budget should have been actually cut instead of increased. This is, remember, a state that ran deficits every fiscal year during the previous decade, and by other measures has some of the worst finances of any state. Wisconsin businesses and families had to actually cut spending thanks to the rotten economy and business climate. Only the severely math-challenged would consider a 7.6 percent spending increase to be a cut.

The state, remember, spends $4.9 billion on its employees every year. A lot of businesses put “dedicated” “employees on the street” because they didn’t have the business to justify their employment. Why were state and local government not required to do the same? This is also a political flaw in hindsight because, given the amount of screaming from public employee unions over a budget that increases state employment, the Walker administration and the GOP might as well have chopped state employment, given that the political result would have been similar.

The only school districts that are being harmed by the 2011–13 budget are those school districts that didn’t take advantage of the new law to hold down employee benefit spending. Those school districts that passed new teacher contracts that included the employee-benefit provisions, or waited until after the new budget took effect, won’t be paying as much in employee benefits.

The unstated fiction here is that if voters only vote for Democrats, everything will be better. There is no way that the public employee collective bargaining restrictions will be undone by a Democratic-controlled Senate. Even when, at some future point, Democrats once again control the executive and legislative branches of state government, I wouldn’t predict that the provisions in the budget repair bill will be undone by future legislative initiative. When schools do not fall apart,  even Democrats will have to admit that in order to spend more government money on something, you have to be financially responsible in other areas funded by taxpayers.