Remember the U.S. Senator who made a speech on the Senate floor in which he claimed that abortions were 90+% of what Planned Parenthood did? Then his office had to issue a statement saying that the Senator's speech "was not meant to be factually accurate."
Sometimes people say something that is 100% factually accurate, but they say it in a way that leads the reader/listener to a totally wrong conclusion. Rep. Michelle Bachmann made such a statement on Aug. 14, and on the Sunday morning talk shows later that week. Even being forewarned that there's a "trap" in this statement, it's hard to find. See if you can pick it out.
"Well, I think the one thing we have to do is reject the new normal level of spending under the Obama administration, because President Obama amped up spending to never-seen-before levels. . . . I mean, one example I'll give you is, we had one employee at the federal Department of Transportation that made $170,000 a year at the beginning of the recession. We had the trillion-dollar stimulus, and 18 months into the recession, we had 1,690 employees making over $170,000. Government has really been growing at — a lot of largesse, but the people in the real world aren’t. And that’s what has to change. Government has no conformity at all with the real world."
Glen Kessler, who writes the "Fact Checker" column for the Washington Post, received several emails from readers wondering about the accuracy of this statement. Here's what he had to say:
"On the surface, the fact appears astonishing — a huge increase in big-paying government jobs under Obama. But this is one of those statements one has to unpack very carefully, because Bachmann uses what is essentially a correct statistic regarding government salaries in a very misleading way. "
"Note that although the GOP presidential aspirant starts out by talking about the “never-seen-before levels” of spending under Obama and then mentions “the trillion-dollar stimulus,” the example she cites — the number of Transportation Department employees making more than $170,000 — uses the metric of “the beginning of the recession.” There’s a reason for that phrase: The recession started in December 2007, 13 months before Obama became president."
"In other words, Bachmann gives the impression that she is talking about something that Obama did, but in fact, the big increase in government pay that she denounces started under Obama’s Republican predecessor, George W. Bush."
"Bachmann’s use of the phrase “beginning of the recession” suggests she knows full well that the pay raises did not occur under Obama, and yet she persists in leaving the impression that Obama is directly responsible for boosting the number of employees making more than $170,000."
"That makes her statistic, while technically correct, deliberately misleading, especially since Obama has actually frozen federal salaries."
You can read Kessler's complete column at this link:
Tomorrow, we'll do one more factually misleading statement. This one involves taxes. Then we'll leave the area of fact abuse and move onto other items of interest to retirees.
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