I Argue With Elizabeth Warren

Had an e-mail yesterday from the wonderful Senator from Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren.  She says,

"I'm glad that the government shutdown has ended, and I'm relieved that we didn't default on our debt.
But I want to be clear: I am NOT celebrating"

She was putting out the current Democratic line, about how much the Tea Party/GOP Shutdown cost the economy -

"According to the S&P index, the government shutdown had delivered a powerful blow to the U.S. economy. By their estimates, $24 billion has been flushed down the drain for a completely unnecessary political stunt.

$24 billion dollars. How many children could have been back in Head Start classes? How many seniors could have had a hot lunch through Meals on Wheels? How many scientists could have gotten their research funded? How many bridges could have been repaired and trains upgraded?

The Republicans keep saying, "Leave the sequester in place and cut all those budgets." They keep trying to cut funding for the things that would help us build a future. But they are ready to flush away $24 billion on a political stunt."

Fair enough. The Shutdown was stupid and pointless, like most of these Washington meltdowns that politicians and the Media love so much. And the Tea Party are a bunch of no-nothing thugs and ignoramuses. And it's a total mystery that anyone votes Republican unless they're multi-millionaires.

But I don't buy the inflated numbers. As a "crazy liberal" in our past, Mark Twain, complained, there are "lies, damned lies and statistics".

[A propos of nothing, there's an amusing video here, in which Sebastian Wernicke addresses a TED Conference - Technology, Entertainment, Design - smart people listening to even smarter people, politics not recommended as a topic - on how to prepare the perfect Talk, based on statistics.]

Worthless statistics are particularly on display when it comes to (allegedly) measuring Public Opinion.  As I point out in my Book Proposal, "The War On The 60s",

"... the media bombard the public day after day with a doctored view of some current “event” – terrorism, a candidate’s sex life, a drug scare, crime. Then - they conduct an Opinion Poll, asking people what they think about that event.

All they are really doing is measuring how successful their propaganda has been.

This is especially true during elections, with disastrous results for the notion of rational choices being made by informed voters.

By the same token, those who decide our agenda can stifle a topic that ought to be a major election issue – in the 2010 midterm election, the United States was fighting at least two “hot wars”, yet they were barely mentioned in the course of the campaign. There was nowhere for a citizen who wanted to vote his concern about these million-dollar-per-soldier-per-year exercises, to turn."

Have a nice day!