The Truth About Lying

Lying and politics seem to go hand-in-hand, and everyone seems to just accept that fact.  According to Forbes magazine in 2019, members of Congress (Politicians) were the least trusted profession in America by a wide margin.  According to Forbes, 58% of the country believe that these politicians have either low or very low levels of honesty.  That number trounced the second least trusted profession, car sales people, by 14 percentage points as they were mistrusted by 44% of the country.  Politicians are clearly in a league of their own when it comes to lying.

And of course, there are many ways to lie.  Politicians can lie right to our faces like when Richard Nixon vowed that he had no knowledge of the Watergate coverup.  Then we had Bill Clinton promise that he, “never had sex with that woman” and Barack Obama assured us that, “if you like your (insurance) plan, you can keep it” which earned him 4 Pinocchios from the Washington Post.  These are just a few examples of in-your-face lies, which is child’s play when it comes to the true masters of this art.  Politicians have figured out how to deceive us even when they are stating facts.  Let me give you a few recent examples.

Today, there is a great debate about why our gas prices are so high.  Many believe it is because the current administration is strangling our oil industry in their misguided (in my opinion) transition out of fossil fuels.  I was sitting on my couch watching the news when I heard the President say that we are producing more oil today than in President Trump’s first year in office.  That sounded like an odd comparison to me.  First of all, that was over four years ago, and in any President’s first term that person’s results are mostly driven by the policies of his or her predecessor.  So, I looked into it.

And in fact, that statement is correct.  In January of 2017, we as a country were producing 8.9 million barrels of oil a day, and today we are producing about 11.5 million barrels a day.  The impression he was trying to give was that he was maximizing our efforts to produce oil now to bring down prices of gasoline here in the US and around the world.  However, in January of 2021, at the end of Trump’s Presidency, our oil industry was producing over 13.1 million barrels per day.  So, we are, in fact, producing LESS oil today than at the END of Trump’s Presidency at a time when we should be producing more.  Clever deception!

When it comes to job creation, we are constantly being told that this administration has created more jobs in its first year than any other Presidential administration in American history.  While it is true that the 14.1 million jobs created in 2021 was far more than any other year in American history.  What they don’t remind you of is that in the year before (2020) we knowingly vaporized over 20.1 million jobs as we closed down restaurants, gyms and thousands of nonessential small businesses in an attempt to curb the impact of the pandemic.  The real truth is that any President who took office in 2021 would “create” (really replace) millions of jobs as we reopened our economy.  In fact, you could argue that the 14.1 million jobs created could have been even higher with different policies, but they are not going to tell you that, of course.  Slick deception.  

Finally, we must talk about the pride that this administration is taking in their deficit reduction results.  Is it true that our national deficit went down in 2021 vs 2020?  This would suggest that this administration is being fiscally conservative.  But we have to look deeper at all the facts before we make an intelligent judgement.  In Trump’s first three years, our deficit averaged about $800 billion a year and his worst year was $984 billion.  In 2020 our country’s deficit was $3,132 billion as Trump tried to fight the pandemic and keep our citizens out of bread lines as we shut down our economy.  Billions were spent on project Warp Speed, replacing and creating Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), the Paycheck Protection Plan (PPP) and an extension and enhancement of unemployment benefits.  In Joe Biden’s first year in office our deficit was $2,772 billion, only a $360 billion reduction compared to the actual year of the pandemic, and he wanted to spend TRILLIONS more on his Build Back Better (Broke) plan.  This is hardly fiscal conservatism, although that’s what he is trying to get us to believe.  Whoever is writing Joe Biden’s speeches is a real master of the art of deceiving with the facts.

I won’t even get into the data gymnastics that Secretary Mayorkas is employing to suggest that our southern border is closed while over two million illegal aliens will cross into The United States each year in his first two years. Those two years will each represent all-time records, smashing the past record by almost 25%. Here is a couple of real facts.  Our politicians will lie right to our faces, so be on the lookout for that.  Also, they will tell you the truth and suggest improper conclusions to those facts.  This is more difficult to identify, but unfortunately that is the challenge they constantly give us.