You used to hear that there are lies, damn lies and statistics… implying, of course, that you can tell the biggest whoppers with them.
I’ll add one to that…. the new mantra is lies, damn lies, statistics, and fact checkers….
That’s because fact checkers seem almost always biased to the left, at least the ones that appear in the major media.
Here’s a howler, from AP “fact checker” Calvin Woodward:
ROMNEY: “Three years into office, he doesn’t have a jobs plan.”
FACT CHECK: Like them or not, President Barack Obama actually has proposed several plans intended to spur the economy and create jobs. The most well-known was his stimulus plan, introduced in February 2009, which included about $800 billion in tax cuts and spending.
At the end of 2010, Obama struck a deal with GOP congressional leaders on a package intended to stimulate hiring and growth. The deal cut the Social Security payroll tax, which provided about an extra $1,000 a year to an average family. It also extended an unemployment benefits program that provided up to 99 weeks of aid.
And in September, Obama introduced his most recent jobs plan, rolling it out in a speech to the full Congress in which he urged Congress to “pass it right away.” It included $450 billion in tax cuts and new spending, including greater cuts to payroll taxes and tax breaks for companies that hire those who’ve been out of work for six months or more. The proposal also would have spent $50 billion to upgrade schools and included other infrastructure spending. Almost none of it has been passed into law.
Calling ANYTHING that President Obama has either done or proposed a “jobs plan” is historically laughable, bordering on the willfully blind. But the most risible part of this: the “fact checkers” appear to consider extending unemployment benefits to be a “jobs plan.”
That’s like calling cemetery insurance a health plan.
The “stimulus” has been the single biggest dollars down the rat-hole boondoggle in US history, as far as I can recall, at least. It has produced jobs, all right, jobs that cost a half-million dollars to fund but pay $50,000 to the worker. And not very many of those.
An actual “jobs plan” has to be something with a realistic prospect of removing barriers to the private sector creation of jobs. Obama has nothing lke that… almost by definition.
This is, of course, just one failure in the “fact checking” in the linked article.
Just repeat after me.
Fact checkers in the major media are mostly liars.
There, now I feel better.
