And yet some people foolishly think he should be considered a serious presidential candidate.
Factcheck.org as of August 15th has this list, which is I might add far from complete and comprehensive:
Fact Checking Perry
Rick Perry has made false or exaggerated claims on U.S. oil imports, the federal debt, Social Security and the federal health care law.
The Texas governor gave a speech Aug. 13 in South Carolina to announce he will run for the Republican presidential nomination. As we have for other declared candidates, we offer here a summary of his past statements that we have found to be false or misleading. We also reviewed his weekend speech and found other questionable claims.But there are more than just these; there are more this WEEK than just these, from factcheck.org:
■In his announcement speech, Perry said the U.S. cannot afford four more years of "rising energy dependence on nations that intend us harm." But U.S. reliance on foreign oil has dropped under President Barack Obama, and it is expected to decline again this year. The Energy Information Administration's Aug. 9 “Short-term Energy Outlook” said U.S. net imports of liquid fuels — as the EIA calls oil and other petroleum products — dropped from 57 percent of total consumption in the United States in 2008 to 49 percent in 2010, “because of rising domestic production and the decline in consumption during the economic downturn.” EIA projects net imports "will decline further to 47 percent in 2011 before rising slightly to 48 percent in 2012." Perry did not identify the "nations that intend us harm," but in March we looked at a similar claim by Sarah Palin and found that from 2008 to 2010 net imports from the Middle East were down 24 percent. Those from Africa dropped 8 percent.
■Perry also incorrectly claimed in his speech that Obama's economic policies "have given us record debt." U.S. public debt as a percentage of the nation's economy is at its highest level since World War II, but not at a record high. The national debt is best measured as “the amount of government debt held by the public relative to annual economic output,” according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. The public debt as a share of the gross domestic product stood at 62 percent last year, and CBO projects it will be even higher, at 69 percent, at the end of this fiscal year. That's high, but it was even higher for seven straight years, from 1943 to 1950, peaking at 109 percent of GDP in 1946, according to the Office of Management and Budget's historical tables.
■Last November, Perry exaggerated the financial problems of the Social Security system, when he claimed that "our kids are never going to see any benefit from it." At the time, the Social Security Board of Trustees had projected that there would be enough money coming in from payroll taxes to finance 78 percent of promised benefits, even when the Social Security Trust Fund is exhausted in 2037. The board's most recent report says the fund will be exhausted by 2036, but "tax income would be sufficient to pay only about three-quarters of scheduled benefits through 2085." Perry would have been correct to say that today’s young workers are not going to see the benefits now promised unless payroll taxes are increased. In an Aug. 5 analysis, the CBO said the payroll tax paid by employers and employees would have to be raised immediately from a combined 12.4 percent to about 14 percent to keep the trust fund in balance for the next 75 years.
■Also in November, Perry exaggerated how much Texas' share of Medicaid costs would increase as a result of the new federal health care law. Perry said the new law would cost Texas "$27 billion more, over and above what we’re already paying over the next 10 years, $2.7 billion every year." That's not true, according to a May 2010 study by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation. The new law expands Medicaid eligibility to cover more Americans. But the federal government will pay most of the extra cost: 100 percent in the first three years, phasing out to 90 percent by 2020. Kaiser estimated that Medicaid enrollment in Texas will increase 63.5 percent by 2019. The total Medicaid cost for the state would be $4.5 billion — but that's only 5.1 percent more, or $219 million, than it would have been without the new law.
Rick Perry’s Imaginary RegulationSo, given that there are a lot of factcheckers out there, not just politifact.com or factcheck.org, or the many others, WHY is it that these people don't watch more carefully what they say? They have to know there are people watching, listening, checking. They have to know that the information is there to be found, and that they are lying. So WHY?
August 16, 2011
Rick Perry falsely claimed the Obama administration wants farmers to obtain a commercial driver's license to ride tractors across public roads.
As first reported by the Des Moines Register, the Texas governor told his tall Texas tale at the Iowa State Farm on Monday — two days after announcing he would run for the Republican presidential nomination. He offered it as an example of "regulations that are stifling jobs."
Perry, Aug. 15: This is just such an obscene, crazy regulation. They wanna make — if you are a tractor driver, if you drive your tractor across a public road you're gonna have to have a commercial driver's license. Now, how idiotic is that?As Perry made his claim, a member of the audience twice yelled out, "That's not true." And it is not. In fact, five days before Perry made his claim, the U.S. Department of Transportation issued a press release saying it had "no intention to propose new regulations governing the transport of agricultural products."
Here's what happened: Under federal law, the Transportation Department requires minimum standards that states must enforce when issuing commercial driver's licenses. The DOT's Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration said that states "may be taking varied approaches" to exempting farmers from those requirements, and may be applying the exemption "inconsistently." So, the agency launched a review, asked for public comments and promised to issue regulatory guidance "to help ensure uniform application of the safety regulations."
That request for public comments, which was published May 31 in the Federal Register, generated a storm of criticism and concern — and misinformation. The National Sorghum Producers posted a blog item Aug. 4 that carried this headline: "A CDL to drive a tractor? Another burdensome regulation looms over ag." The blog said: "The proposal from USDOT would force those who operate any farm machinery, i.e. tractors and combines, to have a Commercial Drivers License (CDL)."
On Aug. 10, the DOT issued a press release saying it had "no intention to propose new regulations." It did, as promised, issue new regulatory guidance "designed to make sure states clearly understand the common sense exemptions that allow farmers, their employees, and their families to accomplish their day-to-day work and transport their products to market." In the press release, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, a former Republican congressman from Illinois, explained why the guidance was issued.
LaHood, Aug. 10: We have no intention of instituting onerous regulations on the hardworking farmers who feed our country and fuel our economy. Farmers deserve to know that reasonable, common sense exemptions will continue to be consistently available to agricultural operations across the country, and that’s why we released this guidance.– Eugene Kiely
The answer is that there are still plenty of gullible, ideology driven, low information voters who only want to be told what they want to hear, and don't want to hear anything that might be factual that would contradict that ideology. When we have candidates for our government that operate that way, we should do everything possible to keep them OUT of office. But we should also be castigating the low information voter who gives them the encouragement to lie, who doesn't know or care about the integrity, or the accuracy, of what they are told.
FYI : WaPost's Glenn Kessler's Fact Check Perry's climate change claims while over at the MN Political Roundtable, there is a discussion on Perry's healthcare views including his efforts to influence state funding for stem cell research.
ReplyDeleteI haven't had the time lately to fact check the fact checkers but I think they are giving him a bum rap on the largest debt ever thing. Have we ever had 14 trillion or more national debt? If not then he was right saying it is the largest national debt ever. He did not say it was the largest ever as a percentage of GDP just the largest ever.
ReplyDeleteYes, we have had larger debt, as factcheck.org noted, in WW II.
ReplyDeleteIf you adjust for the value of current inflated dollars in comparison to the value of earlier dollars, we have had other periods than WWII with higher debt as well.
Little known fact, too little known, was that this country has always had similar debt; even before the U.S. was officially the U.S., under the prior confederation of states, our founding fathers ran up some pretty hefty debt that was proportional to our current debt.
More to the point, the majority of the debt which the Obama administration is addressing was actually from the Bush administration years. The amount of debt added to that by Obama has been relatively modest. So when "Perry also incorrectly claimed in his speech that Obama's economic policies "have given us record debt.", Perry is doubly wrong. It hasn't been Obama economic policies that caused the debt, it was the Republican / Bush policies, including the worst of the bunch, the Bush Tax cuts which should have been allowed to expire.
Tuck,
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry, but this isn't a matter of "which facts you like", Perry's assertion is that this debt LEVEL is unprecedented, it isn't. He knows it, and it's this kind of myopic simpleton speak which panders to those who don't care to know better.
By Perry's math and assertion, Ronald Reagan ALSO set record debt, as did George Bush Sr. and Jr., the issue isn't, not even remotely, the raw dollar figure, it IS as compared to inflation and especially the nation's ability to pay. If we had tax receipts of 400 TRILLION BILLION ZILLION, who'd care about a paltry 1.3 Trillion?
Your assertion would contend that someone who made $100,000 in 1880 wasn't considered fabulously wealthy (maybe not Andrew Carnegie, but really REALLY wealthy), it would assert the $20 Million we paid for the Louisianna Purchase wasn't considered a vast sum of money, obviously it was, and most of all it would mean interest is of no value, that time value of money is not to be considered and so on.
Simply cherry-picking the raw dollar figure to assert something which is a bald-faced deception (at best) bespeaks a man not seeking honest communiction, honest discussion or debate, but rather the same inflamatory, insulting to intellect rhetoric that has poisoned this country for too long. It may work in Texas where the political power swings from arch conservative to ultra conservative, but as DG's points show, giving the rich all your money while watching your schools crumble is no way to run a country.
Put another way Tuck, when the federal government spent $25M to build naval vessels in the middle 1790's it was mostly paid for by debt, yet, that tiny sum in today's money would mean they, that government, was the most efficient, best government ever in our history, despite the VAST hue and cry about the debt incurred at the time. Does that mean in 200 more years, Barack Obama will be considered WILDLY fiscally prudent because his raw dollar sum will be tiny by comparison to debts of that period?
ReplyDeleteNonsense.