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Each US presidential administration I've been under has always cited cherry-picked, sound-bite US statistics -- and has the gall to take credit for them. It's l

Each US presidential administration I've been under has always cited cherry-picked, sound-bite US statistics -- and has the gall to take credit for them. It's like someone's constantly watching the metrics, and every positive blip becomes a candidate for being a talking point. They take cruel advantage of how opaque the connections are between the macroeconomic, political, and social inputs, and the outputs as experienced by individuals. Even worse, talking points like that prime people to expect the government to be constantly manipulating variables in the economy, which causes inefficiency and necessarily leads to more unelected officials running more of the country -- since constant manipulation is inaccessible to legislators.

nullc 4y ago
This one was essentially choice since, with the relevant context, the tweet essentially was attributing near record inflation to Biden's leadership.
- TimTheTinker 4y ago
  Yeah, it's ironic that their claiming responsibility for "inflation-based increase" in social security is correct -- because of their loose monetary policy that caused massive inflation.
  - hackyhacky 4y ago
    Not really: inflation is happening all over the world, not just in the US. In fact, the US has some of the lowest inflation among western nations. The cause of inflation is the economic hit from Covid and our response to it. So my original point stands: the world is complicated, and it's naive to say "Biden caused inflation."
    - makomk 4y ago
      From what I can tell, the US had the highest inflation in the G7 until the Fed started hiking interest rates more aggressively than the rest of the world to get it under control. This was particularly noticable to me since once they did the UK became the G7 member with the highest inflation and our media started pointing at that as proof of our government's economic incompetence in a way that the US media very obviously had not.
      - atdrummond 4y ago
        Yes - the Fed is (for better or worse) more independent and agile than the ECB. Being responsive to only a single nation’s government (even when you’re the global reserve currency) has its perks.
    - atdrummond 4y ago
      Loose monetary policy is what enabled the US to respond to COVID in the manner it decided to. I don’t think you’re being charitable to the poster you’re replying to when you say “it’s complicated” then place much of the blame on the very factor said poster identified.
      - jallen_dot_dev 4y ago
        But the bulk of the response to COVID (what hackyhacky is arguing) did not happen under the current administration, so wouldn't be due to their policies (what TimTheTinker is arguing).
      - dools 4y ago
        Monetary policy is the setting of interest rates by the central bank. Fiscal policy is taxing and spending. Monetary policy has been more or less zero since the GFC.
      - smileysteve 4y ago
        Don't lose the "Biden administration" context. The majority of Covid debt originated prior to January 20th 2021, and with a GOP majority in the Senate. Of the $1400 stimulus sent to individuals, the previous President, the previous Senate Majority Leader, and the 2 incumbent Senate candidates (that didn't win) each campaigned on the equivalent of the $1400. The previous administration is also on record as rejecting audit measures for the Payment Protection Program. The previous administration nominated the fed chairman that increased the federal reserve balance sheet and tools well beyond 2008-2009, while also not adjusting the pace despite the federal stimulus above (and other stimulus until Fall 2021)
      - ajross 4y ago
        > Loose monetary policy is what enabled the US to respond to COVID in the manner it decided to. This still fails to explain why the US is seeing lower inflation than most of the rest of the world, almost none of which has the borrowing capacity of the US federal government.
        ravel-bar-foo 4y ago
  - dools 4y ago
    Monetary policy is the setting of interest rates by the central bank. Fiscal policy is taxing and spending. Monetary policy has been more or less zero since the GFC. BTW loose fiscal policy did not cause inflation.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
hackyhacky 4y ago
Of course the administration uses cherry-picked statistics to get credit. And of course the opponents of the administration use cherry-picked statistics to criticize the administration. Beyond obvious short-term political goals, the reason for this is simple: in a machine as large and complicated as the government, it's really really hard to accurately ascribe meaningful credit (or guilt) for any change, and especially to do so in a way that is understandable by voters. Each administration makes changes (positive and negative) that won't be felt by voters for decades, if at all; and under each administration, voters endure the consequences (positive and negative) of previous administrations. But that doesn't get people to the polls, so why talk about it.
- thrown_22 4y ago
  - dustingetz 4y ago
    the problem is voters are uneducated, or rather the distribution of education will always be uneven so there will always be undesirable selection effects that every elected politician must definitionally survive
  - elmomle 4y ago
    It would be good to have sane conversations in this country about what we can learn from the past few years (in which I think both this administration and the previous one could be accused of serious blunders and politicking) but pointing fingers is not a helpful contribution.
    - thrown_22 4y ago
      It would be nice to have a sane conversation. That however is impossible when one side has decided that the other side should be muzzled, viz. every post even remotely critical of democrats getting flagged here, or until recently getting you banned off twitter.
- akira2501 4y ago
jasmer 4y ago
I think this is a bit hyperbolic language. It's not 'cruel' for any administration to indicate basic realities without some arbitrary historical and legal context. While we should be eternally vigilant and skeptical, the lack of very specific context in this case is nowhere near a blatant manipulation. In fact, I would say the 'problem' is maybe the opposite - I am somewhat more skeptical that this is a 'Musk led personal intervention' to draw arbitrary cynicism towards a political entity he does not like - playing 'moral equivalence' games with people who say "The economy is doing good!" (without nuanced context) and "I won the election!" (without the obvious 'context' that the statement is literally false, or blatantly misleading). That said, it's just skepticism, I really can't say one way or the other obviously. There's clearly a grey threshold in what we can tolerate from government and political statements, and it's very hard to fathom where that line is - but this one is not near that line. If any administration wants to claim "Lowest unemployment ever!" in a Tweet, well then that's fine. They can say that as long as it's true, a history lesson is not needed in this case. In any case, if they are going to do this, they need a set of publicly stated criteria for it, and they need to apply the criteria objectively and consistently.
- kaimalcolm 4y ago
  My question then is, would/will the same fact-checking apply to a different government that Musk does support? He’s been pushing for this equal fact checking and equal platform for both parties, but as far as I can tell we’re not seeing these banners anywhere on politics Twitter besides official government accounts.
- TimTheTinker 4y ago
  > It's not 'cruel' for any administration to indicate the obvious facts without some arbitrary historical and legal context. Yes, it is. A leader's first responsibility is to tell the truth -- and citing misleading statistics is worse than an outright lie. It is cruel to lie to people in a way that causes them harm.
  - gleenn 4y ago
    Unless I'm not understanding the article, it seems like the tweet was truthful, the payout is the highest it's been. Is that entirely due to Biden, less clear. Could also be just adjusting to inflation, also true. But how many things are not adjusted to inflation, so even if the only reason the payout is highest is because of inflation, well at least they are making it match and not ignoring it like a million other things. There are no lies here, only things which might be hard to attribute. And I think it's reasonable to attribute this to Biden in all but the most narrow of interpretations.
happytoexplain 4y ago
>It's like someone's constantly watching the metrics, and every positive blip becomes a candidate for being a talking point. I would add "or negative", and I wouldn't qualify it with "it's like". As far as I can tell, this is the one-sentence description of how the public face of politics works, everywhere, always.
simonsarris 4y ago
It's pretty wild how the @whitehouse twitter account is used. If you looked at only the ones about the price of gas you'd get the impression its been a great ride. May 2021 (with forecast!) https://twitter.com/WhiteHouse/status/1398685824934363138 https://twitter.com/WhiteHouse/status/1398685824934363138 Dec 2021 https://twitter.com/whitehouse/status/1470870982588088325 https://twitter.com/whitehouse/status/1470870982588088325 August 2022 https://twitter.com/whitehouse/status/1554497308024311809 https://twitter.com/whitehouse/status/1554497308024311809
- z9znz 4y ago
  Are you implying that the whitehouse twitter only got stupid starting in 2021? Granted, that account was not so loud in 2016-2020 as perhaps now (maybe... I haven't counted tweets) because the president of that time was tweeting 10+ times per day (some really unmatched crazy shit too).
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    Is the point of bringing up Trump to say that he is a bad person who was doing the same thing, therefore that thing is good? Or are we just making lists of people who have lied?
    - z9znz 4y ago
      I'm objecting to the parent post starting with 2021 as the year to note that the whitehouse account was posting stupid things. That implies that it was not being stupid prior to 2021, when in contrast the most historically asinine tweets in existence (at least from people in places of high authority) occurred in the 2015-2020 range. Tweets in general are not good. Most are pointless, many are stupid, some are evil, and sadly only a few are worth existing. So I'm not suggesting that current White House tweets are good. They are just not remarkable in comparison to the tweets from the previous period.
      - robertlagrant 4y ago
mc32 4y ago
Question, is/was the Tweet covered under the Presidential Records Act? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_Records_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_Records_Act
- codingdave 4y ago
  In short, no - there was a bill to make it so, but it died: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVFEFE_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVFEFE_Act
rib3ye 4y ago
First, think about the people who work in your marketing department. Now think about them with the reach to influence the entire world. That's politics, and it's terrifying.
refurb 4y ago
cherry-picked That pretty universal, no? It's like when Canada's job growth is 70% due to government hiring and the gov't comes out and says "See how well the economy is doing?". Or companies "spin" some negative stat into a positive one.
baby 4y ago
> They take cruel advantage of how opaque the connections are between the macroeconomic, political, and social inputs, and the outputs as experienced by individuals. That's why the more transparency and readily-available information there is, the better : )

nullc 4y ago

This one was essentially choice since, with the relevant context, the tweet essentially was attributing near record inflation to Biden's leadership.

TimTheTinker 4y ago
Yeah, it's ironic that their claiming responsibility for "inflation-based increase" in social security is correct -- because of their loose monetary policy that caused massive inflation.
- hackyhacky 4y ago
  Not really: inflation is happening all over the world, not just in the US. In fact, the US has some of the lowest inflation among western nations. The cause of inflation is the economic hit from Covid and our response to it. So my original point stands: the world is complicated, and it's naive to say "Biden caused inflation."
  - makomk 4y ago
    From what I can tell, the US had the highest inflation in the G7 until the Fed started hiking interest rates more aggressively than the rest of the world to get it under control. This was particularly noticable to me since once they did the UK became the G7 member with the highest inflation and our media started pointing at that as proof of our government's economic incompetence in a way that the US media very obviously had not.
    - atdrummond 4y ago
      Yes - the Fed is (for better or worse) more independent and agile than the ECB. Being responsive to only a single nation’s government (even when you’re the global reserve currency) has its perks.
  - atdrummond 4y ago
    Loose monetary policy is what enabled the US to respond to COVID in the manner it decided to. I don’t think you’re being charitable to the poster you’re replying to when you say “it’s complicated” then place much of the blame on the very factor said poster identified.
    - jallen_dot_dev 4y ago
      But the bulk of the response to COVID (what hackyhacky is arguing) did not happen under the current administration, so wouldn't be due to their policies (what TimTheTinker is arguing).
    - dools 4y ago
      Monetary policy is the setting of interest rates by the central bank. Fiscal policy is taxing and spending. Monetary policy has been more or less zero since the GFC.
    - smileysteve 4y ago
      Don't lose the "Biden administration" context. The majority of Covid debt originated prior to January 20th 2021, and with a GOP majority in the Senate. Of the $1400 stimulus sent to individuals, the previous President, the previous Senate Majority Leader, and the 2 incumbent Senate candidates (that didn't win) each campaigned on the equivalent of the $1400. The previous administration is also on record as rejecting audit measures for the Payment Protection Program. The previous administration nominated the fed chairman that increased the federal reserve balance sheet and tools well beyond 2008-2009, while also not adjusting the pace despite the federal stimulus above (and other stimulus until Fall 2021)
    - ajross 4y ago
      > Loose monetary policy is what enabled the US to respond to COVID in the manner it decided to. This still fails to explain why the US is seeing lower inflation than most of the rest of the world, almost none of which has the borrowing capacity of the US federal government.
      - ravel-bar-foo 4y ago
- dools 4y ago
  Monetary policy is the setting of interest rates by the central bank. Fiscal policy is taxing and spending. Monetary policy has been more or less zero since the GFC. BTW loose fiscal policy did not cause inflation.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

hackyhacky 4y ago

Of course the administration uses cherry-picked statistics to get credit. And of course the opponents of the administration use cherry-picked statistics to criticize the administration. Beyond obvious short-term political goals, the reason for this is simple: in a machine as large and complicated as the government, it's really really hard to accurately ascribe meaningful credit (or guilt) for any change, and especially to do so in a way that is understandable by voters. Each administration makes changes (positive and negative) that won't be felt by voters for decades, if at all; and under each administration, voters endure the consequences (positive and negative) of previous administrations. But that doesn't get people to the polls, so why talk about it.

thrown_22 4y ago
- dustingetz 4y ago
  the problem is voters are uneducated, or rather the distribution of education will always be uneven so there will always be undesirable selection effects that every elected politician must definitionally survive
- elmomle 4y ago
  It would be good to have sane conversations in this country about what we can learn from the past few years (in which I think both this administration and the previous one could be accused of serious blunders and politicking) but pointing fingers is not a helpful contribution.
  - thrown_22 4y ago
    It would be nice to have a sane conversation. That however is impossible when one side has decided that the other side should be muzzled, viz. every post even remotely critical of democrats getting flagged here, or until recently getting you banned off twitter.
akira2501 4y ago

jasmer 4y ago

I think this is a bit hyperbolic language. It's not 'cruel' for any administration to indicate basic realities without some arbitrary historical and legal context. While we should be eternally vigilant and skeptical, the lack of very specific context in this case is nowhere near a blatant manipulation. In fact, I would say the 'problem' is maybe the opposite - I am somewhat more skeptical that this is a 'Musk led personal intervention' to draw arbitrary cynicism towards a political entity he does not like - playing 'moral equivalence' games with people who say "The economy is doing good!" (without nuanced context) and "I won the election!" (without the obvious 'context' that the statement is literally false, or blatantly misleading). That said, it's just skepticism, I really can't say one way or the other obviously. There's clearly a grey threshold in what we can tolerate from government and political statements, and it's very hard to fathom where that line is - but this one is not near that line. If any administration wants to claim "Lowest unemployment ever!" in a Tweet, well then that's fine. They can say that as long as it's true, a history lesson is not needed in this case. In any case, if they are going to do this, they need a set of publicly stated criteria for it, and they need to apply the criteria objectively and consistently.

kaimalcolm 4y ago
My question then is, would/will the same fact-checking apply to a different government that Musk does support? He’s been pushing for this equal fact checking and equal platform for both parties, but as far as I can tell we’re not seeing these banners anywhere on politics Twitter besides official government accounts.
TimTheTinker 4y ago
> It's not 'cruel' for any administration to indicate the obvious facts without some arbitrary historical and legal context. Yes, it is. A leader's first responsibility is to tell the truth -- and citing misleading statistics is worse than an outright lie. It is cruel to lie to people in a way that causes them harm.
- gleenn 4y ago
  Unless I'm not understanding the article, it seems like the tweet was truthful, the payout is the highest it's been. Is that entirely due to Biden, less clear. Could also be just adjusting to inflation, also true. But how many things are not adjusted to inflation, so even if the only reason the payout is highest is because of inflation, well at least they are making it match and not ignoring it like a million other things. There are no lies here, only things which might be hard to attribute. And I think it's reasonable to attribute this to Biden in all but the most narrow of interpretations.

happytoexplain 4y ago

>It's like someone's constantly watching the metrics, and every positive blip becomes a candidate for being a talking point. I would add "or negative", and I wouldn't qualify it with "it's like". As far as I can tell, this is the one-sentence description of how the public face of politics works, everywhere, always.

simonsarris 4y ago

It's pretty wild how the @whitehouse twitter account is used. If you looked at only the ones about the price of gas you'd get the impression its been a great ride. May 2021 (with forecast!) https://twitter.com/WhiteHouse/status/1398685824934363138 https://twitter.com/WhiteHouse/status/1398685824934363138 Dec 2021 https://twitter.com/whitehouse/status/1470870982588088325 https://twitter.com/whitehouse/status/1470870982588088325 August 2022 https://twitter.com/whitehouse/status/1554497308024311809 https://twitter.com/whitehouse/status/1554497308024311809

z9znz 4y ago
Are you implying that the whitehouse twitter only got stupid starting in 2021? Granted, that account was not so loud in 2016-2020 as perhaps now (maybe... I haven't counted tweets) because the president of that time was tweeting 10+ times per day (some really unmatched crazy shit too).
- pessimizer 4y ago
  Is the point of bringing up Trump to say that he is a bad person who was doing the same thing, therefore that thing is good? Or are we just making lists of people who have lied?
  - z9znz 4y ago
    I'm objecting to the parent post starting with 2021 as the year to note that the whitehouse account was posting stupid things. That implies that it was not being stupid prior to 2021, when in contrast the most historically asinine tweets in existence (at least from people in places of high authority) occurred in the 2015-2020 range. Tweets in general are not good. Most are pointless, many are stupid, some are evil, and sadly only a few are worth existing. So I'm not suggesting that current White House tweets are good. They are just not remarkable in comparison to the tweets from the previous period.
    - robertlagrant 4y ago

mc32 4y ago

Question, is/was the Tweet covered under the Presidential Records Act? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_Records_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_Records_Act

codingdave 4y ago
In short, no - there was a bill to make it so, but it died: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVFEFE_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVFEFE_Act

rib3ye 4y ago

First, think about the people who work in your marketing department. Now think about them with the reach to influence the entire world. That's politics, and it's terrifying.

refurb 4y ago

cherry-picked That pretty universal, no? It's like when Canada's job growth is 70% due to government hiring and the gov't comes out and says "See how well the economy is doing?". Or companies "spin" some negative stat into a positive one.

baby 4y ago

> They take cruel advantage of how opaque the connections are between the macroeconomic, political, and social inputs, and the outputs as experienced by individuals. That's why the more transparency and readily-available information there is, the better : )