Thursday, January 28, 2016

Being Ted Cruz Means You Never Have to Apologize for Lying.


The Washington Post quotes Ted Cruz from tonight's GOP primary debate:

“First of all we have seen how in 6 years of Obamacare that it’s been a disaster. It is the biggest job killer in this country. Millions of Americans have lost their jobs, have been forced into part time work, have lost their health insurance, have lost their doctors, have seen their premiums sky rocket.”


What do we make of Cruz's claim that millions of Americans have lost their jobs? This is what the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics tells us about job growth in the Obama era:



The truth, of course, is that under President Obama the nation has seen 69 straight months of private sector job growth, with over 1/4 million new jobs in November alone and a net increase of well over 13 1/2 million new jobs over that span.

What do we make of Cruz's claim that millions of Americans have lost their health insurance due to the Affordable Care Act? The truth is the current rate of 9.2% uninsured is the lowest it has ever been in this country:

Cruz's rather tenuous grasp of the facts when it comes to health care reform should perhaps not surprise us. After all, this is a man so clueless on health insurance issues he mistakenly claimed to have lost insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act, only to have to walk the claim back when it was revealed that, despite his claims to the contrary, Cruz in fact had it all along.

In a reversal from claims made on the campaign trail, Ted Cruz's presidential campaign is now saying the senator and his family do have health insurance and never lost coverage. The late night Friday revelation came more than 24 hours after Cruz had told a New Hampshire audience that he and his family were without health insurance and were scrambling to obtain new coverage--and used the claim to slam Obamacare for the mess he was in. 
In statements to Bloomberg and Wall Street Journal, campaign spokeswoman Catherine Frazier blamed Cruz's false assertion that his family had lost their health insurance on a misunderstanding... 

I guess "misunderstanding" is one way of putting it, another might be to say that he was "caught in another lie."

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