The right has, in effect, decided to switch its head with its butt, cut off its left side and pare away most of its center. No wonder they're having trouble recognizing the truth, much less telling the truth. The center and left can feel sorry for them in their unappealing asymmetry. But we can't go along with the pretense that we lie to the extent they do.
Paul Krugman is eloquent on this subject.
[Jonathan] Chait tells us that the usual suspects are also rolling out the old “the rich in America pay more taxes than the rich in other countries” thing. Yes — because the American rich are much, much richer.
In a way it’s almost a relief to find these guys coming up with new fallacies. Brad DeLong catches the WSJ looking at estimates that federal workers get 2 percent more salary and 48 percent more benefits than private-sector workers — and concluding that this means that they are overpaid by 50 percent.
The important point to make here is that all these bogus numbers are coming from seemingly authoritative sources — Fox News, which is a big organization, the WSJ editorial page, the American Enterprise Institute. You could not imagine a similar level of statistical dishonesty from, say, The Nation, or Washington Monthly, or EPI.
This is what I mean when I say that the left and right aren’t symmetric. People of all persuasions lie; but the right has a whole institutional structure of lying that has no counterpart on the left. ...Paul Krugman
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