Ed Shultz: Not Bright

Check Newsbusters if you want a transcript, but I think you have to watch the video to see the stupid.

He's trying to disprove the thesis that spending is the problem, not revenues, and to prove that, he talks up a chart plotting revenues and spending which... proves that spending keeps increasing every single year (and increasingly increasing in the past three years) while revenue is variable but mostly fluctuates up and down around the same static line (depending on the economy, of course -- good economies = high income = high tax revenue).

I mean, his own frickin' chart shows that the variability in revenue has a flat trendline and only goes up or down depending on an expanding or contracting economy, whereas the only thing that's steadily increasing is the red "spending" line.

And he just talks past that. I don't think he's lying; I think he actually doesn't even understand the lines in front of him.

Oh, he lies on top of that, mis-dating the timing of falls in revenues (for example, revenues fell beginning in 2000 not because of the Bush tax cuts (which were still a year and a half in the future) but because of the Clinton recession.

And he gets flummoxed when the lines aren't doing what they're supposed to be doing (like the revenue line going up big in the middle of Bush's term, thanks to the high tax revenues generated by a growing economy even with a lower tax rate).

But look, he's obviously stupid, and I don't expect him to understand these complex inferences from his stupid chart. But the big picture, right there in front of him in pretty colors? That much I think that someone paid to lecture people ought to get.

"Even I can understand what these lines are doing," he says, self-deprecatingly, but not quite self-deprecatingly enough, because, in fact: He doesn't understand what these lines are doing.

If you say something like "even I'm smart enough to get this" but in fact you're not smart enough to get it, you're not being self-deprecating. You're making an empty boast.

posted by Ace at 02:54 PM

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