Here’s something for the “Ho-hum” file. You know that it’s campaign season when the air waves are filled with distortions, fabrications, and outright lies. One of the more popular gimmicks is to take two contradictory claims and present them with a straight face. Take for instance the declaration that the good times are due to your guy – in this case, Obama – and simultaneously paint a picture of bad times for the guy that you’re trying to throw out – in this case, Trump. Last year, Hillary, in her blame-everyone-else book tour, said that we can hold two ideas in our heads at the same time. Yes, but not if the two ideas cancel each other out. Heads explode.
A classic example of the flimflam bubbled out of the mouth of the California candidate for president, Kamala Harris. While always expressing the saintliness of Obama, she goes on to assert, “In America right now, today, almost half of Americans are a $400 unexpected expense away from complete upheaval.” The old socialist curmudgeon, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren, desperate for news copy and air time, regurgitate the line, or some form of it.
Wait a minute. Did that so-called disaster suddenly erupt when Trump placed his hand on the Bible on January 20, 2017? I kinda doubt that the moment of swearing-in also coincided with the evaporation of people’s bank accounts. For that to be true, magic and the philosopher’s stone enter the realm of science.
You should know by now that when a politician starts quoting numbers logic goes out the window. Where did those numbers – “almost half” and “$400” – come from? It’s the equivalent of child abuse in the field of statistics. Partisan hacks rooting around in a Federal Reserve study found some tidbits that could be manipulated into an indictment. Wham-bam, there you have it.
What’s actually in the Fed study (“Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households”, 2018)? According to the Fed’s green eye-shades, 61% of people have $400 in CASH to pay for an emergency. In the mouths of the Dems, the 61% who “have” becomes 39% who “don’t”, and 39% stretches into “almost half”.
That’s not all of it. Left out of the demagoguery is the word “cash”. “Cash” means Benjamins and excludes many other forms of liquid assets. Also, people make choices … dah! Some prefer to spend till the well runs dry. Others prefer to maintain good credit scores and address junior’s broken leg that way. It’s not like an epidemic of root canals suddenly causes the homeless population to swell.
It’s the same old story since FDR: play class warfare. Dems need a Great Depression, always, all of the time. They can’t shake the Hoovervilles and the bread lines. For them, it’s always and forever-more 1933.
The inexorable pull of Marxian class struggle yanks the Dems further left each campaign season. Now they’re rubbing elbows with Raul Castro. Center/Left used to apply to the Dems. Well, for now, “center” is orphaned.
Read the article, “Americans May Be Strapped, But the Go-To Statistic Is False”, Michael R. Strain, Bloomberg, June 4, 2019.
RogerG