I mentioned this yesterday, but it’s worth adding to the OOTD rolls. Barack Obama has repeatedly claimed to have passed the largest middle-class tax cut in history as part of his 2009 Porkulus plan, which Obama plans to reprise in his jobs speech tonight. Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post awarded Obama four Pinocchios for this “whopper” of a lie, which is bad enough. It enters OOTD territory when Kessler discovers how the White House has bragged about “outside validation” for their dubious claim:Incidentally, the report that the administration official cited as “outside validation” for the 95 percent statistic just mentioned it as an aside. We checked with one of the co-authors, and he said the source for the figure was a White House fact sheet.
The CBPP was embarrassed enough at the regurgitation of political talking points to have avoided footnoting the claim in the report, which is why Kessler had to ask one of the two authors for the citation. That’s doubly ironic, since the article intended to push back against “misconceptions” about how many people pay federal income tax, and the authors ended up propagating more nonsense instead.
Still, I’m not sure which is worse — the fact that Obama’s team tried to bolster their argument by having the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities launder a talking point on their behalf, or that it took the national news media months to ask where the CBPP got their data.