5 ms·
No, it's not any better. This estimate is useless, because of the things I mentioned. The Secret Service costs are likely the bulk of the spending, so unless th
by zone411 16y ago
No, it's not any better. This estimate is useless, because of the things I mentioned. The Secret Service costs are likely the bulk of the spending, so unless they release them, we won't know the real numbers involved. Clinton did not spend 40 times less than $200 million/day.
I'm not sure why you don't understand my point. Friedman cited a falsehood without saying that it was untrue. Clinton's trip did not cost $5.2 million a day. The CBO clearly specifies that the SS costs were excluded multiple times. Friedman did not mention this, so he is just as bad as Bachmann.
- ezy 16y agoWhen (attempting to) think critically, you can't just choose to ignore the entire context. And when you're talking about both the kinds of sources and the order of magnitude or so difference, one estimate is not "just as useless". One estimate is based on the retelling of a made up number by some anonymous source accompanied, with other information that was verifiably not true. Friedman's estimate is based on real honest to god numbers produced by the accounting agency of the government in question minus an unknown amount. He did not mention the missing amount for SS, true. But given the context, I can see why he may have not -- it does't really matter when you're at least an order off [1]. Drawing a false equivalence here is not thinking critically. [1] The budget for the entire year for SS protection was 689M in 2008 [http://whitehousetransitionproject.org/resources/briefing/Patterson-Cost%20of%20WH.pdf http://whitehousetransitionproject.org/resources/briefing/Pa...].