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So many liars, so little time

A few minutes ago one of my wife’s friends forwarded an email to her filled with what appeared to be ludicrous claims about the cap and trade bill. Among the obvious whoppers:

Beginning one year after enactment of the Cap and Trade Act, you won’t be able to sell your home unless you retrofit it to comply with the energy and water efficiency standards of this “Cap & Trade” bill, passed by the House of Representatives. If it is also passed by the Senate, it will be the largest tax increase any of us has ever experienced.

The Congressional Budget Office (supposedly non-partisan) estimates that in just a few years the average cost to every family of four will be $6,800 per year. No one is excluded.

The emphases are in the original, but they are only that. There are no links. The email suggests:

Take a look at H.R. 2454 (Cap and Trade bill).

Well, my wife’s friend was somewhat concerned (she was dubious) that this load of crap might be true, so I decided to look into it. And, silly me, I took the emailer’s advice. I “took a look at H.R. 2454”, a daunting task, considering it is 1427 pages long. I downloaded a PDF and started searching for the obvious key words and, predictably, found no evidence for the email’s claims. Finally I got smart, and pasted one of the above quotes into google, where I found this article debunking these claims.
Turns out this email has been circulating for awhile. It’s of a piece with the others that are forwarded to my wife on a regular basis. It’s rather amazing that otherwise intelligent people are ready to give credence to these sort of absurd claims simply because they get an anonymous email, and are ready to forward them to others, thereby giving an implicit endorsement of their contents1 .
I’m sure it has happened, but I’ve never heard of stuff emanating from the left. It appears to be a device of the right. We are all ready to believe what we want to believe, but the ignorant masses to which this sort of thing is addressed are more susceptible, since they never question something that is both written (and therefore authoritative) and consistent with their paranoid world view. One would think, however, that it would at least occur to them that if even Fox isn’t spreading it, it must be a whopper indeed.

UPDATE: As a partial response to a comment, I think it’s a bit inaccurate to say that the article merely says that the $6,800.00 number was not generated by the CBO. The CBO actually did come up with a per person number for the cost of the bill-about minus 40 dollars for the poor to about plus $340.00 for the very wealthy. That doesn’t take into account, of course, the benefit obtained by way of a salvaged (we hope) environment. The article also links to another article, in which it debunked the additional claim that you would need a license to sell a home. My own efforts to determine the truth of that claim were limited to doing a search for “license” and “retrofit” in the bill, both of which terms appeared multiple times, but never in relation to single home sales. I think it would be nice if the bill was “transparent”, if that means easy to understand, but that’s an impossibility when you’re talking about a highly technical bill. The Obama administration has made a lot of mistakes, but a lack of honesty about what they are trying to do in major legislation is not among them. As with the health care bill, the cap and trade bill has been deliberately misrepresented. Given the total lack of intellectual honesty on the part of present day Republicans, that would happen if the bill consisted of a single paragraph with words of no more than two syllables.

  1. I don’t include my wife’s friend in this bunch; she was clearly unconvinced and made that know.??


This was written by JCW. Posted on Saturday, April 10, 2010, at 2:49 pm. Filed under Crazies. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Trackbacks are closed, but you can post a comment.

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