Posted on 09/29/2011 4:18:42 PM PDT by mandaladon
“Who Increased the Debt? President Reagan 189%. President GHW Bush 55%. President Clinton 37%. President GW Bush 115%. President Obama 16%.”
There’s a saying attributed to Winston Churchill that goes something like this: "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on."
Try as we might at The Fact Checker, we find that no matter how many times we clearly identify an untruth — such as a ridiculous e-mail on Obama’s health-care plan — it still keeps popping up, months later.
So imagine our surprise when we found in our Facebook feed this week a chart, purporting to show how Republican presidents — Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush — had increased the debt by a significantly greater percentage than either Bill Clinton or President Obama. Pretty impressive chart, “liked” by at least 7,000 people on a posting by the liberal group MoveOn.org.
But this chart, originally created by the office of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, is as phony as a three-dollar bill. Our friends at PolitiFact did a pretty thorough takedown of it in May, giving it their worst rating: “pants on fire.” They even caught the Pelosi people in a bad mathematical error, based on the fact that the Democrats calculated the numbers as if Obama took office a year later than he did.
That error greatly reduced Obama’s supposed percentage increase (from 35 percent to 16 percent) and boosted George W. Bush’s increase (from 86 percent to 115 percent). Pelosi’s office corrected the math error after it was spotted by PolitiFact, but amazingly, the chart that turned up in several places in our Facebook feed was the old chart.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Washington Post? Obambi is in trouble!
LYING LIARS TELLING LIES.
Obama has already written 2-1/2 times as much debt as Reagan did during his entire 8 years in office. Obama has already written more than four times as much debt as GW Bush did at this point in his Presidency.
Yeah, someone posted it on the FB page. I just deleted them from my friends list. Too stupid to be my friend. (I’m not usually that cynical, but have no patience here).
Presidential budgets are always dead on arrival. The chart should show debt according to who controls Congress.
It also suffers from a moving starting point... I had a liberal acquaintance who just LOVED to push this graph. So I asked him straight up:
We’ll start with $100. We’ll invest it. When it reaches $200, you get the profits - a 100% increase. Now, when it reaches $380, I get the profits beyond $200. That’s only a 90% increase. Clearly I am receiving less - because I only got a 90% increase and you got a 100% increase. Never mind you got $100, and I got $180. I only got the last 90%, you got a full 100%.
He suddenly didn’t want to talk about it much any more...;)
Rather than look at the cumulative change of debt relative to GDP, look at the absolute dollars in constant terms. On that count, President Obama is only bested by the 8 years of President George W. Bush, but at the rate President Obama is going, he’ll surpass President Bush sometime in mid-next year.
Exactly. This game of only pointing to which party has the Presidency is a lie. It is Congress that controls the purse strings and the reality is budget deficits fall under Republican Congresses and grow under Democrat Congresses.
It was Johnson and his Demcratic Congressional allies that started spending the SS surplus. That story hasn’t been told at all.
The media’s allowed Democrats to lie for nearly a century. Progressives, starting with Teddy R., have ruined America.
I had thought that quote was Mark Twain, though could have been Winston. Or Will Rogers.
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