Misinformation is a problem, but it's not emanating from the political right
Accusations of misinformation are almost entirely directed toward Republicans and conservatives — yet that's far from the truth. Misinformation has in fact been used to disseminate political propaganda, but the bias isn't a conservative one. Below are some examples the left has used to infect the U.S. with its agenda.
In the late 1960s, the government began to push student loans to supposedly make college more affordable. Universities used this largesse to goose their costs — which have risen much faster than inflation for the last fifty years. In 1970, Harvard tuition cost $4,070, and it is around $75,000 today. That is an increase of around 1,800%.
I went to the University of Illinois in 1971 and 1972, and the cost was around $1,500 per year. After a nearly 2,000% increase, it is now around $30,000.
The solution for the government when the costs skyrocketed was to give them more money rather than adjust policy to control costs.
As prices rose for higher education, median family incomes went from $9,870 in 1970 to $87,864 in 2022 — up around 900%. College costs went up twice as fast as incomes. The government subsidies to universities did not make college more affordable; they did the opposite.
So what is the Democrat solution to all this college debt? Is it to force colleges to control their costs? Of course not — it is to make other people pay off the massive debts.
I borrowed money to go to college because my parents couldn't afford it. Not once did my parents or I assume that someone else was responsible to pay it off. I also borrowed substantial amounts of money to put my three children through college, and not once did my children, my wife, or I assume that someone else would be on the hook for their schooling. What a concept — to be responsible for your own debt.
Maybe part of the problem with college costs is that universities occasionally hire fake Indians named Elizabeth Warren, paying them over $400,000 per year to teach only a few courses.
Democrats have always wanted to move toward government control of health care, and they saw their opportunity in 2009, when they had complete control of Congress and the White House, to make an incremental move with the misleading name of the "Affordable Care Act" — nicknamed Obamacare.
Obama and others went around repeating the known lies that Obamacare would substantially lower costs, you could "keep your doctor" and "keep your plan," and the deficit would be lowered because the government could now control student loans.
Anyone with a brain knew that a bill with massive mandates that dictatorially told everyone what they had to buy and mandated that they buy it or pay a fine would not lower costs. Unsurprisingly, prices skyrocketed until Trump abolished the individual mandate. Most of the media cheered to get the bill passed, even though Pelosi wouldn't even let people read it before it was voted on, famously saying, "We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it." According to an Obamacare architect, voter "stupidity" was to blame for the bill's passage:
And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass.
The supposed non-partisan experts at CBO projected that the takeover of student loans by the government would help pay for Obamacare. Instead, it drove up the cost to the taxpayer at an exponential rate:
In March 2010, the CBO estimated the federal student lending program would save taxpayers $40 to $62 billion from 2010 through 2020. In May of 2019, the CBO produced a new projection that showed the program would cost taxpayers $31.5 billion over the next decade, but an internal analysis by the Department of Education in 2020 determined taxpayers would be left with the significant expense of $435 billion[.]
Mainstream misinformation is a real issue, but the guilty party is the Democrats. Why would we ever trust people who claimed that government involvement in education and health care would lower costs? We continue to see the fallout, and to believe in political fairy tales would prove the Obamacare architect right — that the voters really are "stupid."
Image: Pixabay, Pixabay License.