The Lies Progressive Democrats Are Telling Us

The political Left in general, and American progressive Democrats in particular, have a different sense of reality from most people. Many Democrats might actually believe the falsehoods they utter. For me, it is an open question how much of what they say is what they actually believe. How much do they know to be actually false, but they propagate anyway to further their cause? This post is an attempt to understand what that difference is. Of course, the first thing I have to do is persuade you that the Democrats are copiously lying.

The Lies Democrats Tell

One of the biggest lies Democrats are gaslighting us with is that Biden’s economic policies have been a great success. I have written recently about this in a post comparing the policy results of Joe Biden and Donald Trump, so — despite the fact these might be the most important of their prevarications — I will not spend much time on these lies here.

The brazenness of Biden’s economic claims is illustrated by a relatively recent claim. Astoundingly, he asserted he inherited 9 percent inflation from Trump when he took office. What he inherited was actually 1.4 percent inflation, although it was beginning to tick up. Biden’s claim is so unbelievable, I offer the YouTube video below to verify it.

As further verification, I offer the plot below of CPI inflation vs. time from the beginning of Trump’s administration to April 2024. Both the data and the plot come from the Federal Reserve Economic Data Base at the St. Lewis Federal Reserve District Bank. Biden took over at the end of January 2021.

Some of Biden’s greatest image problems have been videos showing him as mentally unfit for his office. Below is a compilation of a number of such videos courtesy of Fox News and Sky News Australia. In addition to showing Biden’s current mental frailty, it shows his mental decline over time.

Or how about the videos below showing a confused, disoriented President Biden being guided to the next place he had to go. They run over several minutes of time and cannot be accused of being selectively edited.

Many of these videos come from official transmissions of the government itself. It would seem impossible to dispute their authenticity. Yet that is exactly what the Democratic Party is doing. Spokespersons for the party have been claiming that videos showing Biden’s physical and mental weaknesses have been altered. In their words, they are “cheap fakes,” created by selective editing. Because of both the length and the large number of these so-called “cheap fakes,” any clear-headed observer would have to conclude these Democratic claims are absurd. Instead, their claims reveal a growing Democratic panic over what Biden’s escalating dementia portends for the 2024 elections

The Left’s Secular Religion

Most of the Democratic lies in the previous section are clearly ad hoc, designed to rescue themselves from their own failures and political problems. However, their most important lies are ones they ardently believe themselves. Nevertheless, these falsehoods are ones anyone can easily debunk, using publicly available data from such sources as the World Bank and the American Federal Reserve.

A famous quote from former President Ronald Reagan is that “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.” This illustrates the big differences between Democrats and Republicans. Democrats believe governments are competent, capable, and morally required to solve or at least ameliorate most social and economic problems. For the Democrats, this assertion amounts to a statement of faith in their secular religion.

Unfortunately for the Democrats, empirical data show that almost the exact opposite is true. The real nature of the world is that governments almost never can fruitfully attack such problems. In the past I have shown this to be true for most economic affairs by looking at the economic results from all the countries in the world. Each government in the world controls its economy in different degrees and different ways. The degree that governments control their economy is measured by the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom. The Heritage Foundation publishes these indices annually for every country for which there is enough data (which is for almost all of them). In addition, one needs a number of figures of merit for each of these countries. These figures of merit include such things as per capita GDP, GDP growth rate, and the Gini index.

The Gini Index measures how evenly a country’s GDP is distributed across the population. If the Gini Index were zero, then the GDP would be totaly evenly spread across the population. If it were 100, then only one person in the entire country would possess the entire GDP. The smaller a country’s Gini Index is, the more widely spread the GDP is distributed. It is good to have a large per capita GDP. However, if a large GDP serves a country’s people well, it should be evenly distributed across the population as much as possible.

Periodically, I go through the exercise of plotting for every country these figures of merit versus the country’s index of economic freedom in scatter plots. The last time I did this was in 2023 using data for 2022. Every single year I have done it, the best fits of functions to the data showed conclusively the figures of merit got better (some of them much, much better) the less government controlled its economy. Since most social problems are related to how well the economy performs, those problems also get better as government control grows less.

And the reasons why the best government is the least are readily found. They have to do with the fact that social and economic systems are so complex as to be chaotic. In a chaotic social system, the more control over the system is devolved to the lowest possible levels, to those who directly face their problems and best understand them, the more likely fruitful solutions will be found. All this is discussed in greater detail in the post How Is the Weather Like a Country’s Economy.

However, the most important reality is not in the theory that explains the data, but in the actual empirical data itself. That is more than sufficient to debunk the lies from the secular religion of progressive Democrats.

The Role of the News Media

So why is it Trump’s approval level remains so close to Biden’s? The very fact that Democrats tend to lie about everything should drive voters into the Republican fold. On June 19, a Fox News poll showed that in a hypothetical matchup between the two, Biden was ahead by 2 points, 50 percent to 48 percent. That is within the margin of error, but still, why is it so close?

People tend to be intelligent observers of the world, but singularly lacking in-depth knowledge of many crucial issues. Their days are absorbed by making a living, figuring out how to use their limited incomes, and taking care of their children. At the end of the day, they are more motivated to watch a show on TV than in doing a large amount of research on politicians’ claims. Instead, they rely on news media to inform them on the current nature of social reality.

And in the modern world, the reporters, editors, and political pundits of the media are members of our country’s elites. Since most of those elites support the left, it is no surprise that, with very few exceptions, the news media slant their coverage to favor progressive Democrats. An article in the Washington Examiner cites a Media Research Center study of 115 election stories from ABC, NBC, and CBS. It found 87 percent of these stories treated Republicans negatively, even though Republicans control neither the White House nor the Senate.

We can only hope the American people will begin to believe the evidence of their lying eyes, rather than what they are told by the bulk of the so-called “news media.”

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