Politifact uses fuzzy logic to defend Dems, beat on GOP
October 1, 2021
Fact-checkers at Politifact used a double standard when writing about President Joe Biden’s claim that the proposed $3.5 trillion infrastructure bill has zero cost, which further undermines the trust in the press.
“In theory, the bill could live up to that promise,” concludes Politifact. “If the trillions of dollars in spending is offset by trillions of dollars in tax hikes on corporations and the wealthy, as Biden said, the bill could be debt neutral.”
My Build Back Better Agenda costs zero dollars.
Instead of wasting money on tax breaks, loopholes, and tax evasion for big corporations and the wealthy, we can make a once-in-a-generation investment in working America.
And it adds zero dollars to the national debt.
— President Biden (@POTUS) September 26, 2021
In theory, the bill could also cost more money if the proposed tax hikes aren’t added. But either way, the idea that the bill pays for itself is false
Would Politifact qualify such arguments “in theory” if the GOP made such claims that a defense spending bill would pay for itself if tax increases were added on, say, newspapers, to cover the costs?
It’s doubtful.
Politifact has always been a supporter of spending money on “infrastructure” because they support the Democratic Party agenda.
And the math used to make predictions of cost is notoriously friendly to any Democrat’s proposal.
For example, when the CBO scored Obamacare in 2010, it was supposed to “only” cost $950 billion over a 10-year period. By 2012 the costs had soared to $1.8 trillion while covering fewer people than had been proposed.
Obamacare was supposed to cover 32 million people, but instead just covers 20 million.
In other words, the costs would be way higher if Obamacare actually did better what it was designed to do.
But for a more contemporaneous analogy, one only need look at what Politifact said about the GOP’s 2017 Tax Cuts And Jobs Act.
The keystone Republican economic policy saw unemployment dip from 4.87% to 3.67% between 2016 and 2020, a decline of 25%, at a time when prominent Democrats, including Obama, said that no more jobs could be created.
Yet, when Politifact claimed at the time that there is not solid evidence that tax cuts create jobs, calling the idea “mostly false.”
“Jobs were created after each of the laws went into effect,” concluded Politifact about claims by U.S. Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.) that previous tax cuts created jobs, “but some of Smith’s numbers were off, and experts agree that there are too many factors that create jobs to simply say tax cuts are the reason. We rate this statement Mostly False.”
So apparently, when governments increase taxes and take away from private spending as in the case of the infrastructure bill, it costs no money, but when the money goes back to individuals in the form of tax cut, we can’t tell if jobs are created as a result?
Logic like that is not mostly false – it’s completely, 100%, patently false.