Comments on: MarketWatch Is More Right Than the WaPo Factchecker Says It Is

By: Misaki

Misaki — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 04:17:58 +0000

Maybe forgot to add in taxes. Less people might be complaining if taxes had gone up to match spending without affecting unemployment.

Job creation without government spending, inflation, or trade barriers: http://jobcreationplan.blogspot.com/

By: Mike

Mike — Thu, 31 May 2012 16:49:37 +0000

tecwrite, spending as a percentage of GDP has two variables, spending and GDP. If spending stays the same but GDP drops, the ratio looks worse. So it isn’t entirely accurate to criticize spending using this metric.

By: Mike

Mike — Thu, 31 May 2012 16:47:17 +0000

The argument against these numbers that I usually run into center around the actual amount of spending that Obama has done. In his first term, he’s projected to spend somewhere around $13trillion. As best I can tell that’s the most 4 year amount of any president in history, accounting for inflation of course.

The folks who point this out don’t care that Obama took office in the middle of the second worst financial crisis in history, with huge unemployment, two wars, a crush of people retiring and beginning to utilize Medicare and Social Security.

My question is how much of Obama’s spending was on things he had no control over and how much of it was truly discretionary? Anyone have a handy way to figure those numbers?

By: Michael

Michael — Wed, 30 May 2012 22:36:21 +0000

The purpose of “fact-checking” is to catapult right-wing lies under the guise of refereeing. Politifact made this abundantly clear, when they named a completely true statement “lie of the year” because it made Republicans look bad.

By: Michael

Michael — Wed, 30 May 2012 22:35:08 +0000

Obama didn’t increase spending so much as the economy is in the, ah, bathroom.

By: tecwrite

tecwrite — Wed, 30 May 2012 15:37:32 +0000

Jared left off the graph that shows the national debt.

Government spending as a percent of GDP has been historically around 20%. Obama increased that to 24% and has not only left it there but plans on maintaining it there for the next 10 years.

His ‘plan’ is raise taxes on the rich. Some say that won’t work because it will slow the economy. I do not know about that. I do know that he will take the money raised and give to the union goons and Solyndra style backers that fund his campaigns. That is what he does. It will not reduce the debt.

By: Fred Donaldson

Fred Donaldson — Wed, 30 May 2012 15:34:01 +0000

Their fact-checking allows Fiscal Times pieces to run without explaining what that organization advocates and who founded it.

The Post is often so inside the elite beltway, it can’t see the forest for the trees that it pulps to make the paper it covers with austerity messages and cries for spending slices for the poor and tax hacks for the rich.

By: procopius

procopius — Wed, 30 May 2012 12:22:32 +0000

You’re writing as if the WaPo was somehow an honest player in these games, or at least an impartial reporter. On the contrary, the WaPo has been a right-wing rag since at least the mid-1980s, and specifically a neo-conservative propaganda organ since 1994. They don’t even make a pretense of confining their propaganda activities to the editorial pages. Their news stories, especially on Page One, are rife with editorializing and slanted reporting, when not downright lying. They have rightly become known as “Fox on Fifteenth Street.”

By: davesnyd

davesnyd — Tue, 29 May 2012 23:11:23 +0000

I think the supposed “liberal media bias” doesn’t really exist– if anything, it is quite the opposite. Perhaps, as you allege, from a desire to seem even handed. Perhaps, as the Occupy types often claim, because they are mostly owned by billionaires and large corporations. Perhaps, as I’ve heard others state, because most of the “successful” media members are themselves financially successful and so sympathetic to their own class.

Any way you slice it– they seem to have been much less generous to Obama and Clinton before him than they have been to the Bushes and Reagans. And they seem determined to overlook Governor Romney’s issues and treat him like an honest and fair campaigner (see Halperin’s Time interview if you want to view the source of my frustration on that issue).