Image by Tom Tomorrow

Uhler decried the "pseudoscience of climate change" as hindering economic progress and claimed that there's actually been a global cooling trend in the last 10 years. (Actually the last 10 years have been some of the hottest on record, causing glaciers around the world to melt, according to data and observations from a consensus of the world's climate scientists, including NASA, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the United Nations Climate Change Conference.)

It's the same story with the consolidation of wealth, which hurts the free market fantasy that letting the super-wealthy keep more money will eventually trickle down to benefit us all. Uhler simply denied the growing disparity of wealth, saying the "movement between quintiles is significant."

He was talking about people's ability to go from poor to rich with a little hard work and initiative, the core idea of free market conservatives. But data from the U.S. Census Bureau and many other entities indicate that median wages have been stagnant for decades (which wouldn't be true if there was lots of upward mobility) and that most of the wealth created in the U.S. over the last 40 years has pooled with the top 1 percent.

In fact, when it comes to measuring social impacts, Uhler has simply one metric: "Governments at all levels are twice the size they should be to maximize economic growth." (Steven T. Jones)