Daily Archives: October 29, 2010

It’s the Stupidity, Stupid

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David Sirota authored the posting It’s the Stupidity, Stupid. Thanks to my friend MardyS for linking to this on his Facebook page.  It is the perfect response to my posting Poll: Americans Don’t Know Economy Expanded With Tax Cuts.

Sirota writes:

What could cause this intensifying politics of free-market fundamentalism at the very historical moment that proves the failure of such an ideology? Two new academic studies suggest all roads lead to ignorance.

The first, by Harvard’s Michael Norton and Duke’s Dan Ariely, finds that Americans grossly underestimate how much inequality our economy produces.

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…the most powerful factor in our economic illiteracy is found in the other new academic report—the one examining our innate denial reflex.

Poll: Americans Don’t Know Economy Expanded With Tax Cuts

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Bloomberg News published the article Poll: Americans Don’t Know Economy Expanded With Tax Cuts.

The Obama administration cut taxes for middle-class Americans, expects to make a profit on the hundreds of billions of dollars spent to rescue Wall Street banks and has overseen an economy that has grown for the past five quarters.

Most voters don’t believe it.

A Bloomberg National Poll conducted Oct. 24-26 finds that by a two-to-one margin, likely voters in the Nov. 2 midterm elections think taxes have gone up, the economy has shrunk, and the billions lent to banks as part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program won’t be recovered.

“The public view of the economy is at odds with the facts, and the blame has to go to the Democrats,” said J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co., a Des Moines, Iowa-based firm that conducted the nationwide survey. “It does not matter much if you make change, if you do not communicate change.”

Isn’t it odd how a news service whose primary duty is to inform the public can find out that the public is ill informed and yet not even think to ask about their own culpability?

When people read the news and find that the reporters of that news often miss the most obvious questions, it is no wonder that the news services are losing customers.  You would think it would be in the news service’s own interest to figure this out, but even with that incentive, they missed it.