Map of life expectancy at birth from Global Education Project.

Friday, July 13, 2012

Politics is horseshit


The reason not to vote for Mitt Romney is because he actually was involved in Bain Capital from 1999 to 2000? Really?

Yes, Mitt Romney lies, all the time. In fact I'm not sure he's capable of making a verifiable truth claim that isn't false. But what matters are his lies about matters of public policy and statesmanship. For example:

  • Obama has not raised taxes. In fact he has lowered them.
  • The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act ("the stimulus package") did indeed save millions of jobs.
  • Obama did not go on a world tour apologizing for America.
  • The Affordable Care Act is not a government takeover of health care, and it is indeed substantively the same as the Massachusetts health care reform Romney used to take credit for.
  • The Affordable Care Act is not a "job killer." (A CBO study estimated it might induce some people to retire earlier than they might have otherwise. That's the factoid he is distorting.)
  • Romney does not have a plan to reduce the federal deficit. On the contrary, the policies he espouses would increase it. 
  • He wants to raise taxes on low and middle income people, not cut them.

I could go on and on.  The point is, exactly when the guy stopped being actively involved in the affairs of Bain Capital is of no particular interest to me. I already know that the purpose of Bain Capital was to make profit, not to "create jobs," and that whatever Romney did or did not do there is pretty much irrelevant to the job of president anyway. Can we talk about stuff that matters?




2 comments:

Anonymous said...

No, we can't talk about stuff that matters. I'm not sure when it happened, but I think there's a law against well-informed logic.

roger said...

it seems that in politics "stuff that matters" is what riles your opponent and helps get you elected.