by Rosemary Rivera and Jia-Jia Zhu

I really liked the blog posts from my colleagues, Charlie Albanetti and Tahisha Victor, and they got my thinking about how crucial being correctly informed is in a democracy.

Once again, just watching the same poll data over and over again: we want to solve what we believe are budget problems.  But from the feedback that I hear from our canvassers and organizers, many people are simply repeating sound bites–like the datum presented by Governor Cuomo that says a handful of superintends earn 3 figure salaries is justification for a second round of billion dollar cuts to education.  So that echoed and vaunted datum starts to act like a quick and dirty stab to justice denied to ourselves with each repetition.

There are a number of issues with the entire concept of this article. For example, two in three people in the US think their state is in a budget crisis. Well, how many of them were actually right? Of those polled, how many live in states with actual budget crises, and how many were not?

This strikes me as a quantitative question with a right or wrong answer. That two in three Americans see it the same way is probably telling in its own right: it seems like the Republican message is getting through, if not the appetite for their remedies. But there is a real baseline here to compare and contrast with, so why is that not included in the report?

The other problem is that, as is the typical blind-spot for polls, multiple choice questions leave us with only one predefined set of answers. What are the choices: all budget cuts. And the problem with that is we don’t need to cut the budgets when we were making money in this country. Nowhere in there is the option to “put people back to work and raise tax revenue,” though this is in reality the only measure that works.

I’m not arguing that budgets can’t be cut, that bloat doesn’t happen, that success doesn’t hide a multitude of sins. I’m saying success hides a multitude of sins.

So millionaires aren’t leaving New York en masse, and Social Security plays no role in this budget crunch.  Social Security just happens to be completely solvent and will be for the next 15 years.

My favorite American past time, though, is the rallying cry of American exceptionalism, and here I’ll end with this lovely chart:

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/19/opinion/19blow.html