Suspending the Debt: A License for More Wasteful Spending
Welcome to the world of conservative misrepresentation about the U.S. Debt. What is so outrageous about the Heritage Foundation's claim is they use a visual misrepresentation to make their case.
The first thing one should note about the Heritage Foundation's fraudulent graphic up above is the use of equivalent spacing for unequal passages of time.
The gap between the first two dates are 3.5 months apart, yet the gap between the second and third date is 19.3 MONTHS apart.
However, the graph/graphic is made to look like both equivalent gaps involve the same amount of time! This breaks the FIRST RULE of Graph data, the time span between equivalent distance sections of a graph MUST BE THE SAME, otherwise any visual comparisons are basically worthless, or worse.
But there is additional Heritage Foundation "fact sheet 128" misrepresentations. The Heritage Foundation Graph shows that the overall debt limit is about to explode, yet the exact opposite is true.
The first Heritage Foundation chart segment gap shows an increase of .3 trillion over 3.5 months, or, 0.085 trillion per month. The second gap shows an increase of 1.1 trillion over 19.3 months, an increase of 0.057 trillion per month, or, .028 trillion LESS per month than the first segment of the chart.
If the debt was growing by .085 trillion per month, and that growth is now being reduced by .028 trillion per month, that is a 33% REDUCTION in the growth of the debt! And that is not even taking into account that a significant portion of that growth is interest charges on the total debt.
In essence, the only growth in the federal budget debt at this point in time is directly related to interest rate charges being charged on the entire debt.
The Heritage Foundation chart is actually showing a SIGNIFICANT SLOW DOWN in the increase of the debt and is an IMPORTANT STEP towards reversing the growth in the federal debt.
However, the Heritage Foundation graph appears to imply that the federal debt is expanding at an ever increasing rate.
The Heritage Foundation is not the only entity that either mistakenly or purposely misrepresents chart data. Many chart quoters will expose the top of a chart to make it look like something is exploding when a "wider view" of the chart would show the change is actually within a normal range.
I used to listen to president Ronald Reagan explain how the increase in military spending for the next budget was the lowest percentage increase in many years. But now when President Obama can use the same language to explain that the budget increase is occuring in much smaller percentages, suddenly that falls on deaf ears in the conservative community.
It appears that some conservatives sometimes seem to use the concept of percentage of increase or percentage of decrease when it comes to the budget as a way to deceive the american public.
This type of chart and graph deception has been going on for years by many groups, not just the Heritage Foundation.
Hi, Your comments matter greatly. If you post anonymously it helps if you briefly explain how your prior experiences relate to the comment you are leaving. Please no link ads unless you contact me first.
