Mark Twain famously said there are three kinds of lies, “lies, damn lies and statistics”.
I just wanted to make a note of all the bullshit, grossly inflated numbers conservatives are throwing around to attack things like healthcare policies and the stimulus bill. The stim bill initially cost about 700 billion, plus letting banks print some more money so they could start loaning again, which they are to pay back as they stabilize. But to hear a conservative blogger or pundit talk about it, it’s obama’s “ten trillion dollar stimulus bill”. Not kidding.
I don’t know how the hell they even got that. What, they added up the interest from that part of the deficit for the next century? Probably.
Now it’s obama’s trillion dollar healthcare bill. It will cost about a trillion dollars… over the next decade. Or about 80 billion a year, to make medical insurance universal (about 1/10th what we spend on medicare/medicaid), and they’re proposing budget cuts to pay for it.
They always factor any expenditure out over many years to make it sound much more expensive, which is just as dishonest as saying obama’s healthcare plan will cost us only five dollars. A minute, I mean. Five dollars a minute.
Come support the financial wizardry that is the amazing five dollar healthcare solution!
And while I’m at it, I know of an insidious government project that will cost 100 TRILLION dollars. That’s right, one hundred trillion big boys. And it kills people, and hurts our troops.
It’s called the US military. And that’s what it’s going to cost us! Oh, um, I mentioned that that is over the next century, right? But it’ll cost that! Gotta get rid of that military…
I saw a chart on the heritage foundation’s website (which if you don’t know is a bullshit conservative “think tank” designed to support and legitimize conservative policies), it showed what the deficit would be in like 80 or 90 years…
Um, a lot of stuff is gonna happen in the next century. Do you know how much money is going to be in your bank account in 80 years? Of course not. And neither do they know what the deficit is going to be in 80 years or even five years. But when bashing policies it helps to inflate the number and make it as big as you possibly can while still being able to utter the figure with a straight face. All this blowing things out of proportion has been bugging me lately. So I thought I’d make a 3am rant about it.
Night all.
agnophilo 
The military is supposed to be self-sufficent but they now contract almost everything out to civilian companies that end up costing the tax payers more money than if they let the military do it themselves.
Actually, professional militaries are roughly the furthest thing from self-sufficient pretty much by definition. What they do isn’t designed or supposed to turn a profit or break even. What comes back out of it is supposed to be peace of mind, not savings for the taxpayer.Our military can and does (and pretty much always has) contract out for everything from guns and jets to training manuals to food. The one thing it shouldn’t be contracting out for is manpower. At the point we’re hiring mercenaries, our professional public military has failed.My personal favorite additional lie category is “graphics”
Yes, they scream a TRILLION DOLLARS. Well, over the next decade for the 175 million us workers, that is $1.56 a day. Tell THAT to a wingnut and say, well, do the math and you know thaey can’t.We also pay 15.3% of GDP for healthcare. The other 12 industrialized nations are ALL in the single digits.
@LydJaGillers – Yup. War, like healthcare, is becoming for-profit.@BobRichter – Graphics? And I agree.@Mugo60 – Again true.
If you want to hear the entire report from the WHO, go to mikemalloy.com and click of his latest video and you will hear other astonishing numbers where we are dead ass last in other comparables.He is an atheist so in my mind, that means ‘truthful’.
If you had shown me a conservative being realistic and making a point without baseless slander and exaggerations, I would have actually been surprised.This is just business as usual.
@Mugo60 – Alrighty.@ElliottStrange – True.”Conservative” has lost any positive meaning and is now something ugly.
It shouldn’t matter how much it costs our government. What the morons who argue against healthcare are saying is that it should still be a priveledge? To whom, though? It’s not like the people without healthcare are their idealized badguy who doesn’t work or who is litigious and wants a piece of that malpractice payment pie (as if that it a realistic reason for healthcare costs rising). We have a moral obligation to our fellow citizens to put this in place and the people who espuse JAY-ZUSSS all the time don’t want to share? Idiots like Michelle Bachmann say they pray and fast for healthcare legislation to be blocked? WTF? So, you think God will block something that it the right thing to do? In the words of Barney Frank “On what planet do you spend most of your time?”
@Casbahmaniac – Couldn’t agree more.
@agnophilo – Which is to say graphs. Even when technically accurate, they are often misleading or presented with misleading commentary. They take the statistics type of lie to a whole new level. There are some real gems out of Cold War Propaganda.
@BobRichter – Yeah. Like the “obama wall of debt” charts they held up in congress all the time after the economy collapsed that didn’t count bush doubling the deficit which they sat by for for 8 years.