Lie to Me

No, not the TV show, although the reviews I've seen are positive.  No, the subject is The Big Lie.  For those who don't remember, The Big Lie is a metaphor or description of repeating a statement, known to be not even remotely true, loudly and often.  The point being to convince those who would oppose the course of action explicit or implicit in The Big Lie, to nevertheless act as proponents of that course.  While the epithet is commonly attributed, originally, to Goebbels, it originated with Hitler ( here... ).  The technique depends on group think, for which "The Emperor's New Clothes" is my favourite cite.  Read the wiki article; the origin is not likely what you remember from school.

The Big Lie du jour is that Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid (you do know that most of Medicaid is for middle class old white folks, not brown poor children?  I thought not) are being decimated because "people are living longer".  Very early on in this endeavor, I mentioned this Big Lie in the piece "Modern Lovers".  That was April, 2009.  The liars are still at it.

I don't watch Maher's show as much as I once did; he doesn't have the balls to deal with the right wing lunatics he insists on having on.  I definitely don't watch when he has two or more lunatics.  But I did watch last night.  And the Big Lie went off undemolished.  If it were just Maher (and I've posted the issue on his website) who played dumb, well, it's his show.  But Donna Brazile was on the panel, and she did, too.  That's a Big Problem, since she is head of the DNC, and it's her job to call Bullshit on the Big Lies (yes, there are, boy howdy, more than one).

I mentioned in an earlier post that I had been solicited to apply for a Data Analyst position at the DNC.  One of the required responses was Motivation (300 words or less).  I let it be known that data analysis doesn't seem to be going all that well, in that Democrats generally (and by implication the DNC who are the "thought leaders" for the Party) have been letting these Big Lies skate by all the time.  When the Emperor has no clothes, you have to say so, every time.  They aren't doing that, and I stated that my motivation was to get the data out there.  All the data support the Democratic position; unless you're a lazy ass 1%-er, of course.

Here's how I put it in another post:
Well, demographers know better. The increase in life expectancy *at birth* rose about two decades over the 20th century. It rose by about *2 years* at age 65 over the same period. Read that again. What it means is that more folks were around to fund social security (designed from the start as a current account program), far in excess of their extra few months at the back end.

I will give credit to Obambi, when Boehner bounced, he was explicit that the deficit problem shouldn't be fixed on the backs of those who least caused the mess and are the least able to pay.  Well, he did say the latter, but I don't remember him making the former.  I only heard excerpts, so it's possible he made the whole case.

That last quote says that Social Security (and the rest) are current account funded programs.  There is another Big Lie, which I'll deal with at some point as it's very long and somewhat technical, that retirees "paid into" Social Security for all those years, and so shouldn't be denied.  Well, it was never designed as a collective 401(K), which would be stupid and not something you would want, as anyone who wanted to retire on one found out the last few years.