Factcheck.org shows newest campaign lies by both sides

Uh, you missed this, Mr. Fair and Balanced.

http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/more_tax_deceptions.html

Was that on the homepage?
That is all I was looking at, I didnt go into the archives.
If I did miss it, I apologize.

Mr. P. has a name for politicians. He calls them, "professional liars". Bottom line, a politician does what he has to do to be elected. Now, as someone said, "...........You can't please all of the people all of the time".

Sooo........................a canny politician will often bend the truth to maximize his support by as many people as he is able.

The biggest problem with McCain isn't all those half-truths, but his push to privatize social security. It's a wonder to me that all middle class and poor voters still support McCain who will take away their only safety net in retirement; their social security.

More workers are working much longer than their normal retirement age now, because a) they have not saved enough for their retirement, and b) their retirement investments have not performed as well as they expected when they planned to retire at normal retirement age.

Middle class and poor republicans must be masochists; that's the only conclusion one can arrive at with their support for McCain.

There's no cure for stupid.

I can't imagine trying to follow any of these campaigns without a factcheck.org subscription. I've learned a lot over the years through them.

How is it the republicans fault for people not saving enough?

Could record spending by the democratic led congress be a reason also?

I don't think factcheck.org was designed to keep score. They do a good job of investigating things, but they don't investigate everything.

Which years of record spending are you referring to?

The GOP congress has done every budget but one in the last 10 years. Are you saying none of those years had record spending let alone record borrowing?

Answer the first question before you move on. This Congress did a great job is raising spending.

I don't know whether they actually lie or whether after awhile they become delusional or whether they just exist on hope of self-fulfilled prophecy. I do know that American politics is based far more on sales promotion than anything valid these days. Some of it should be illegal. It's like it's okay to say your product is best when you know it isn't, but it is illegal to say your product cures cancer when it won't.

Alexis de Toucqueville once said, "There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle."

Patrick Jake O'Rourke once said: "The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it."

In the end, the problem is the numbnuts that believe the hype and then vote. I didn't coin the phrase and don't know the author, but one of my favorite quotes is that there are too many Democrat congressmen and senators and Republican congressmen and senators and not enough U.S. congressmen and senators.

I wonder who would get elected come November if EVERYBODY--media, spinmeisters, special interest groups, and candidates were required to tell the truth and nothing but the truth for the 60 days prior to the election?

Who do you think is responsible for the decrease in real median income for the average American family in the last 8 years? You can't exactly give the party in power a pass on economic issues since much of their policy does affect it. (Interesting side note. The median income increased the year the Dems took congress.) When families find themselves with less and less real income it makes it harder to save.

Meanwhile, while American's income has dropped the cost of health care has increased. Another issue that has been ignored by the GOP.

WRONG!!!!!!

Between 2006 and 2007, real median household income increased 1.3 percent to a level of $50,233Â"the third consecutive annual increase.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/fsbr/income.html

MEDIAN is affected by grossly raising the top incomes, Woiyo. This is exactly what happened. The AVERAGE income is lower, when corrected for inflation.

Basic math skills help in discussions such as this.

Cycloptichorn

Then sue the source since you apparently are smater than they are.

The source is Whitehouse.gov. They specifically use Median instead of Mean, because it makes it look like things are getting better for most Americans, when in fact they are not.

Cycloptichorn

Actually, the average or mean would be more affected by outliers.

However, it appears that they are definitely playing with the numbers to paint a rosy picture.

From Woiyo's link:

Previous
$49,568
2006
in 2006 dollars

Current
$50,233
2007
in 2007 dollars

The meaning is clear, that they did not adjust for inflation. The number I found for inflation in 2006 is 3.24%. Therefore, median income actually dropped.

For Many, a Boom That Wasn’t

Article Tools Sponsored By
By DAVID LEONHARDT
Published: April 9, 2008

It’s not just the apparent recession. Recessions happen. If you tried to build an economy immune to the human emotions that produce boom and bust, you would end up with something that looked like East Germany.

The bigger problem is that the now-finished boom was, for most Americans, nothing of the sort. In 2000, at the end of the previous economic expansion, the median American family made about $61,000, according to the Census Bureau’s inflation-adjusted numbers. In 2007, in what looks to have been the final year of the most recent expansion, the median family, amazingly, seems to have made less " about $60,500.

This has never happened before, at least not for as long as the government has been keeping records. In every other expansion since World War II, the buying power of most American families grew while the economy did. You can think of this as the most basic test of an economy’s health: does it produce ever-rising living standards for its citizens?

In the second half of the 20th century, the United States passed the test in a way that arguably no other country ever has. It became, as the cliché goes, the richest country on earth. Now, though, most families aren’t getting any richer.

“We have had expansions before where the bottom end didn’t do well,” said Lawrence F. Katz, a Harvard economist who studies the job market. “But we’ve never had an expansion in which the middle of income distribution had no wage growth.”

More than anything else " more than even the war in Iraq " the stagnation of the great American middle-class machine explains the glum national mood today. As part of a poll that will be released Wednesday, the Pew Research Center asked people how they had done over the last five years. During that time, remember, the overall economy grew every year, often at a good pace.

Yet most respondents said they had either been stuck in place or fallen backward. Pew says this is the most downbeat short-term assessment of personal progress in almost a half century of polling.

What surprises me more than anything is how the likes of woiyo et al can continue to spit out stats to show that the middle class and the poor are better off today than they were before Bush while the majority says different. They must be immune to the problems of the middle class and the poor - or they can continue to lie to themselves and their families - that they're not the ones suffering from the higher cost of fuel and food, loss of their jobs and their homes, and that their children are attending the best schools in the country.

Amazing!