Things You Should Never Believe

A new game: It’s called Things You Should Never Believe. And why can you never believe them? Because they are always bogus, which is to say, they lie.

1. CBO – The Congressional Budget Office; they lie regardless of which party is in power and cannot be trusted to be anything remotely close to accurate. Remember when they scored the Affordable Care Act?

Health Reform: Remember when Democrats were promising that ObamaCare would cut the deficit by $1 trillion in its second decade? Turns out they were off by, well, about $1 trillion.

And even that’s assuming that:

ObamaCare’s extraordinarily deep Medicare cuts would actually be made if the law remained in place. In fact, it assumes (based on official estimates from government agencies) that ObamaCare will reduce Medicare spending a total of $1.1 trillion from 2018 to 2027. Without these draconian Medicare cuts, ObamaCare would be a huge money loser going forward.

Medicare’s own trustees — which includes several top Obama administration officials — says that ObamaCare’s steep payment cuts to doctors and hospitals who treat Medicare patients “are unlikely to be sustainable” because they’ll drive doctors out of the program and push half the nation’s hospitals into the red. – IBD

And they weren’t any more accurate on their enrollment projections:

As for enrollment, the number that actually signed up in the exchanges was less than half the CBO’s projection. And the reduction in the uninsured is more like 14 million, not 30 million, and all of that reduction is the result  of the Medicaid expansion, not the law’s private sector regulations and mandates.

So now that the CBO has scored the GOP “repeal” plan…who cares? You can’t believe a word they say anyway.

2. Polls: They also lie regardless of which party is in (or likely to be in) power and cannot be trusted to be anything remotely close to accurate. So if anyone claims they have a poll showing that your candidate/issue is winning/losing ignore them. Unless they predicted both Brexit AND Donald J. Trump’s win.

Because polls can easily be effected by exogenous variables:

As well as “fake news:”

So we’ll just have to wait to see if Geert Wilders wins or loses today because you sure can’t rely on the polls.

I only have time for the two entries today but this is an audience participation game so please add your own suggestions for other “Things You Should Never Believe.”