Townhall...
7 Ways Politicians
Mislead The American Public
By John Hawkins
Government has become too damn big, too damn intrusive, and too damn
lucrative for the good of the country. That’s why so much of the
political class in this country is comprised of con men, sociopaths,
and fortune hunters. Quite frankly, most of these people would rather
that you didn’t understand their motives, what they really want to do,
or the policies that they’re implementing because what’s actually good
for the country is a much smaller consideration than what’s good for
them personally. Since this is the case and the mainstream media has
become little more than a tool of the Democratic Party, the average
person has to know the tricks of the trade if he wants to figure out
what’s really going on. Towards that end, here are some of the many,
many ways that D.C. pols mislead the public about what they’re trying
to do.
1) I oppose my opponent’s pro-wife beating stand. What do you do if
your opponent takes a sensible, rational and popular stand that you
can’t beat? Simple: claim he holds a completely different position and
attack that. There is very little real discussion of issues in D.C. and
a lot of discussion about who hates women the most, who wants old
people to die in the street like dogs and who wants to give the rich
more of the poor’s money to light their cigars. This tactic is so
prevalent that you can go months or even years at a time in D.C.
without any genuine back-and-forth about the issues at hand.
2) A rose by any other name may be a skunk. The name of a bill doesn’t
necessarily have anything at all to do with what the bill actually
does. For example, like it or hate it, the Patriot Act has nothing to
do with patriotism. Obamacare, which is called the Patient Protection
and Affordable Care Act, will actually raise the cost of care and will
inevitably lead to the deaths of countless Americans -- as lifesaving
procedures are denied to save the government money. In other words, put
no stock in what a bill is called because for all you know, the Puppy
and Orphan Protection Act may advocate grinding up puppies and orphans
into a special brand of environmentally friendly Soylent Green.
3) What I say trumps what I do! No one should be surprised that
politicians often say one thing and then do another. However, this has
become a standard strategy for Democrats since they can count on their
allies in the mainstream media to cover for them.
Barack Obama is a case study in how this works. For his first two years
in office, he governed as a hyper-partisan Stalinist who compromised on
almost nothing, even as he talked incessantly about compromise. He’s
the most wasteful spender ever to occupy the White House, but he talks
like Jim DeMint on deficit reduction. Obama has run the most bumbling,
ham-handed foreign policy since Jimmy Carter; yet we hear constantly
from him on the importance of diplomacy. In other words, the difference
between what Barack Obama says and what he does is a wee bit larger
than the distance between the earth and moon.
4) We’ll get right on that....tomorrow. In politics, the future is now.
If a politician isn’t willing to do the right thing today, he’s
probably not going to be willing to do it next year for exactly the
same reasons. There are as many examples of this in politics as there
are overly-thin women who model for a living.
Remember Ronald Reagan’s “one time” amnesty for illegal immigrants back
in the eighties? He was going to make the illegals American citizens
and then get around to securing the border afterwards. Twenty five
years later, we’re STILL waiting for the security half of that deal.
Then there are the Medicare fee cuts that stem from a 1997 law. For
years, we’ve been planning to cut the pay-outs to doctors for Medicare,
but we continually put it off. Now we’re slated to cut the fee pay-out
for Medicare by 21%. Is that going to happen? Probably not. If we
actually did it, a lot of doctors would drop their Medicare patients
faster than you could say “Holy Viagra, Grandpa!” Yet, each year, we
just kick the can down the road, pretending this cut is actually going
to happen someday.
We’re getting the same spin on budget cuts. Our spending is
“unsustainable,” but we can’t actually cut spending now because it’ll
supposedly slow economic growth. Of course, if the key to economic
prosperity were government spending, we’d be in the midst of one of the
largest economic booms in the history of the entire known galaxy
instead of trying to stave off a debt-driven “Obamapression.”
5) There are lies, damned lies, statistics, and CBO scores. Is the
Congressional Budget Office a left wing hack group that’s trying to
mislead people? No, not at all. However, the numbers they put out often
have very little to do with reality for a simple reason: Congress
writes the rules that they have to go by when they’re making estimates.
Then, Congress conveniently takes advantage of the loopholes they’ve
created to game the system. It’s like letting hackers write the code
for your blog and then scratching your head when someone keeps changing
your front page to “N00b, yew aRe thE GHEY” every week.
For example, the reason Obamacare’s services aren’t set to begin until
2014 is largely to game the CBO’s 10 year budget. Then there are
Obamacare’s Medicare cuts. Supposedly, they’re going to cut 500 billion
dollars from Medicare. Will that ever happen? Who knows? Whether the
cut ever happens or not, the CBO has to score it as if it will.
Unbelievably, they also have to “double count” the money to make both
Medicare and Obamacare look more financially feasible -- when, of
course, sadly you can only spend it once (Shhhhhh, don’t tell any of
the people counting on receiving Social Security a decade from now).
Does that mean CBO numbers are always useless? No, but be aware that
it’s extremely easy to game the numbers and because of that, their
estimates may be off by hundreds of billions or even trillions of
dollars.
6) “Our only hope is a Blue Ribbon Panel!” -- #Thingspeopleneversay
Theoretically, a special panel or blue ribbon commission could do some
good, but in the real world that happens about as often as Obama’s kids
go through a TSA patdown. Usually, politicians know exactly what needs
to be done, but find it politically unpalatable; so they do one of two
things. Either they create a panel stacked with partisans that will
agree with whatever useless but politically appealing course of action
they want to take or alternately, they allow a real panel to be
created, whose suggestions they will then promptly ignore.
A great example of this is Obama’s Bowles-Simpson debt panel. Obama
spent the better part of a year punting any serious questions about the
enormous debt he’d created because there was a commission working on
it. Then, they finally came out with a report and he promptly ignored
their suggestions. Now he’s putting together a new commission to answer
the same questions as the last commission. This is an attempt to trick
the public into thinking that he’s doing SOMETHING about the issue
other than golfing when he could be sitting at his desk and figuring
out how to waste even more of our money.
7) If that’s a cut, then why are we spending more money? Have you
wondered why we spend more every year despite the fact that we hear
people in D.C. howling like Banshees about all the terrible “cuts” in
spending? Well, the reason is because if we plan to increase spending
by 20% and then some conservative complains, and spending is only
increased by 15% as a result, that’s called a 5% “cut” in spending
instead of a 15% increase.
A great example of how this works is the new budget compromise the
Republicans and Democrats pushed through. The Republicans claim it
“cuts” 38 billion dollars in spending this year. However, we’ll
actually be spending only $352 million less than we would have had the
budget never been passed. In other words, despite all the rhetoric and
government-shutdown brinksmanship, we ended up cutting less money out
of the budget than we’ll probably borrow from China while Barack Obama
is eating his waffle for breakfast tomorrow.
Read it at Townhall
|
