By The Numbers: While Politicians Always Lie And the Numbers Always Tell The Truth

We occasionally do a post under the theme “by the numbers” where we take real world numbers to show how delusional and ignorant the American politician can be in the face of numbers that tell a different story that he or she is telling. To see previous posts under this theme, just enter “by the numbers” in the search box above.

1)No overall theme, just a look at some numbers today that show how inept the American class continues to be. Consider this first set of numbers from the June 14, 2019 edition of The Week magazine:

• The median out of pocket cost for the 49 best selling prescription drugs increased 76% from 2012 to 2017.
• Sixteen of those 49 top selling drugs more than doubled in cost over that time period.
• One of these top selling drugs, Lyrica, went from $174 in 2012 to a whopping $411 in 2017.
• I go over these numbers because this were the prime years of Obama Care. Remember, Obama promised that his landmark legislation would “bend the cost curve” of medical care in this country downward and make health care much more reasonable. 

As we have pointed out many times, he lied about so many things, this remarkable cost increase in existing top selling drugs being just one one lie of many. The numbers show that Obama Care likely and dramatically increased the cost of popular medicines, the exact opposite of what it was supposed to do.

2) An article in the most recent Libertarian Party newsletter discussed the following pathetic numbers:

• A recent Rasmussen poll found that 60% of Americans believe that the Federal government bureaucracy looks out only for itself, not the taxpayers and citizens it is supposed to be serving.
• Only 27% believe that the Federal government primarily serves the interests of the American people.
• Only one in six polled felt that government bureaucrats “do the right thing most of the time,” less than 20%.
• It is now 47 years since the majority of Americans trusted the Federal government.

Pretty pathetic results but not unsurprising. Wasteful spending, scandals, idiotic public statements,the inability to think through a problem and actually resolve it, etc. has left most Americans with a feeling that Washington has no clue what is going on and how to manage it. And those Americans would be right.

3) Most Washington politicians should never talk about economics because they are almost totally ignorant of the subject and thus, their actions usually make economic conditions worse or they just show their stupidity. A recent article in Reason magazine by Katherine Mangu-Ward is a perfect illustration where politicians say one thing but the numbers show the exact opposite:

• Many liberals/Democrats/Socialists in this country claim to be looking out for the common man/woman and that capitalism is killing off the economic dreams of the middle class, that the middle class and poor are falling further behind as the “income gap” grows.
• Their typical and nonsensical knee jerk reaction is to tax the wealthy more in order to save the middle class which obviously makes no sense.
• But the numbers show just the opposite. [Please note that the following numbers have all been adjusted for inflation over time so that all of the numbers are off a cost basis of the year 2016.]
• The article shows that in 1967, 53.2% of American households were considered middle class, i.e. they earned between $35,000 and $100,000.
• By 2016, about 50 years later, using inflation adjusted numbers, only 42.1% of American households were middle class, i.e. earning between $35,000 and $100,000 a year.
• Horrors, the Socialists must be right, the American middle class is shrinking and being destroyed by capitalism.
• Not so quick; while the American middle class may be shrinking the reason for the shrinkage is that they have moved out of the middle class and are now classified as upper class, i.e. they are earning over $100,000 a year.
• In 1967, only 8.1% of American households were considered upper class but by 2016, 27.7% of Americans were considered upper class, earning over $100,000 a year, again, based on adjusting to inflation using 2016 as the base year.
• And not only did the middle class shrink in size, but the lowest earning American households, earning less than $35,000 a year also shrunk, going from 38.7% in 1967 to 30.2% in 2016.
• So the numbers show that in reality the only growing income bracket of the past 50 years was the wealthy bracket, those households earning over $100,000 a year while the middle class and lowest income household brackets actually shrank over those years.

So, another time when politicians’ rhetoric does not match the reality of the numbers. In total, middle class and low income households in this country are shrinking because those types of households have been getting wealthier and wealthier over time.

4) Liberals/Democrats/Socialists would also like you to believe that we are being overrun by violent crime waves and thus, we need to have stricter and stricter gun laws to stop the rampant violence. As the numbers show, this is not the case (with the possible exception of places like south Chicago which already have the strictest gun laws around AND the highest violent crime rates):

• According to the Reason article, the violent crime rate across the country dropped .9% in 2017.
• The murder rate fell 1.4%.
• Both of these statistics follow a long term decreasing trend in both rates.
• Property crime rates have been trending downwards for the past 20 years according to the FBI crime analysis.
• The number of crimes per 100,000 people in the country’s urban areas has dropped from about 10,000 per 100,000 people in 1990 to less than 4,000 per 100,000 in 2018.
• Fewer crimes means fewer people in prison with the 1.5 million Americans in prison in 2018 being a nine year low and a reduction of 1.3% vs. 2017.
• Since 2008, the prison incarceration rate has dropped 15% across the country with the rate having dropped over 30% in some state prison systems.

So politicians would say that there are too many people going to prison but the numbers show that the rate of people going to or in prison is declining. 

Politicians would say that we have to forfeit our Second Amendment rights because of out of control violent crimes but the numbers show that violent crime is going down without the need for more gun control. 

Politicians would say that the middle class and lower earning American households are going away because of some nebulous political slogan called “income inequality” but the numbers show that the reason for this decline in the number of middle class and lower earning households is because these folks, on average, are in the highest earning brackets now.

And finally politicians told us that Obama Care would reduce medical costs including medicines but the numbers show that at the height of Obama Care, the legislation was actually driving/allowing drug costs to accelerate their upward cost trend.

All of which proves once again that while politicians may lie, the numbers never do.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

https://www.amazon.com/Walter-Bruno-Korschek/e/B002KYU08Q/ref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:


http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w