Unthinking Dishonesty

President Barack Obama’s dissembling is legendary. Recall his claim, oft repeated, that if you like your health insurance policy or your doctor, you can keep them. Recall his oft repeated claims that Presidents don’t have the authority to act unilaterally on immigration in exactly the way he acted last November.

Here’s a couple more things he said.

The pattern overall is that the climate is getting warmer. That’s undeniable[.]

Except that the data are unclear on this, in the way that Obama means. It’s indisputable that the climate has not gotten warmer over the last 18 years. It’s indisputable that orbital mechanics and the sun’s cycles play a major role in Earth’s climate change. It’s indisputable that, over Earth’s existence, the sun is heating up. It’s indisputable that, over geologic time frames, Earth is warming. It’s entirely disputable that human activity is having a major effect on climate.

Obama also said,

Our homicide rates are so much larger than other industrialized countries, by like a mile.

Most of that is attributable to the easy, ready availability of firearms, particularly handguns.

No. Today’s homicide rate is half that of the Clinton administration’ time frame, yet handgun ownership has vastly increased since then. In general, gun ownership, and lack of gun control laws are correlated with fewer murders. For instance, in 2011, California, with the most stringent gun control laws in the US (according to the Brady Campaign), had a gun murder rate of 3.25 murders per 100,000 people. Texas, with pretty loose gun control laws, had a gun murder rate of 2.91 per 100,000. Utah, with the loosest gun control laws in the US, had a gun murder rate of 0.97.

Of course, Obama knows these things. He’s too smart, too well educated, too widely read, and too current on the events in the world not to know these things. But lying to get his way is so habitual in him that he just says these things of convenience without the slightest thought.

What could be worse than that? His Democratic Party has said not a word to correct his errors. These men and women also are too smart, too well educated, too widely read, and too current on the events in the world not to know these things. Their silence on the matter demonstrates that they agree with his behavior as much as with his claims.

See, too, the Democratic Party’s silence on Hillary Clinton’s misbehaviors in violating Federal law with her Secretary of State private email accounts and her accepting—quite sizeable—donations from foreign governments while she was sitting in the Secretary of State’s chair, even if the money was washed through her Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation‎.

Remember this in 2016.

Typical

In an ambitious first budget plan, Governor Tom Wolf on Tuesday proposed more than $4 billion in higher taxes on income, sales and natural gas drilling to support new spending on schools and to cut property taxes as part of an effort to overhaul the way public education is funded.

Wolf, a Democrat, is also asking the Republican-controlled Legislature to cut corporate taxes by hundreds of millions of dollars, borrow more than $4 billion to refinance pension debt and inject new money into business loans, clean energy subsidies and water and sewer system projects.

Pennsylvania already is in the hole by some $2 billion, and it’s getting an increase in allegedly mandatory spending, for the upcoming fiscal year, of $1.6 billion.

So he wants to raise taxes overall and to borrow more. Because money grows on trees in the Democratic Orchard.

Wolf’s spending plan would increase overall state spending through the state’s main bank account by about 3% to $29.9 billion from the current year’s approved budget. Counting $1.75 billion in pension obligation payments to the Public School Employees Retirement System and $2.1 billion in school property tax relief receipts, the increase is about 16%….

“Pay” for tax cuts here by raising taxes there. Borrow to cover increased spending. But raise taxes overall, and increase spending. Mandatory spending? No. There is no such thing. Some spending is harder to cut, whether fiscally or morally, than other spending, but none of it is mandatory beyond the bare minimum needed to fund what the state’s constitution—the people’s instructions—mandates is the government’s purpose.

Covering the budget shortfall by cutting spending is anathema. Covering the budget shortfall by also cutting taxes and watching the economy grow from that increase in private sector money, yielding a net increase in revenue to the government, is utterly inconceivable.

How Democratic.