Friday, January 25, 2008

Why You Can't Argue with a Liberal

A liberal friend of mine (yes I have them) sent me this as she knows my affinity for charts.

And key to understanding this is that she is about 55 years old

The reason that this is key that any truly (and I mean this) independently thinking individual who is intellectually honest will look at each "item" and say, "wait a minute, that is..." fill in the blank.

"Fill in the blank"

Irrelevant
Not adjusted for inflation
Not adjusted for the size of the economy
Cherry picked data (my personal favorite is the 4 countries whose opinion of the US has dropped...OUT OF 176 FREAKING NATIONS IN THE ENTIRE WORLD!)

In anycase, long story short, for I am on vacation, it is the perfect example of why you really can't argue with a liberal beyond a certain age, because they have an ideology they're going to subscribe to and will find the data that FITS that ideology, never letting the data or fact actually form their ideology.

I know this chart will be frustrating because it is so disingenuous plus there are some outright lies (and I like how they cite their figures) but take solace in the fact that this is literally their "best" argument. Additionally, this should emphasize the importance of being intellectually honest. If you really do care about society and your fellow man, you wouldn't resort to such pathetic tricks and selective data when it comes to advocating how an entire nation should be governed.

Additionally, I might have said something to the extent that "Under President Washington income per capita was only $560. Wow, he sucks even worse than Bush."

Again, why you should leave the adjusting for inflation to the professionals.

5 comments:

Able Archer said...

In defense of that liberal friend of yours, even after adjusting for inflation, the US economy and public finances are in much worse shape now than in 2001. It is quite likely that they would be in even worse shape might Gore have won in 2000. Then again, we could have handed over the Presidency to Alan Greenspan, and today we would be in much better economic shape.

How about this: if the election results are too close to call (say within 5%), just have the Federal Reserve run the government for 4 years.

Ro! said...

I like the one about Poverty

The calculated poverty line went up 21% ($8,590 to $10,400 single person) but the number in poverty only went up 16% (31.6M to 36.5M)

Sounds like a good thing to me..

david pasquinelli said...

why don't you adjust for inflation yourself? multiply all the number on the left by 1.1708

for example:

national debt 2001 = 5.7 trillion * 1.1708 = 6.67356 trillion

national debt 2007 = 9.2 trillion

difference = 2.52644 trillion

for effect that's a $252,644,000,000 difference

AND that assumes the data wasn't adjusted for inflation.

Captain Capitalism said...

You adjust debt not for inflation, but as a percent of GDP, which has deteriorated, but the rest of that stuff, sheesh. As Ro! points out, the poverty rate should be applied, not nominal poverty and that's just for starters with that chart.

Able is right. The Fed should just run the country. And I should Chairman the Fed.

Anonymous said...

The new private sector jobs data is an unmitigated lie.