The Lies Are Getting Dumber and Lazier

Infuriating dishonesty.

So let’s tell the same story two times, changing details a bit the second time, with a short quiz at the end.

First version: You walk into a grocery store, pick up a hundred dollars worth of ribeye steaks, walk to the cashier, and pay the cashier $100 from your wallet.

Second version: You walk into a grocery store, pick up a hundred dollars worth of ribeye steaks, walk to the cashier, and pay the cashier $40 from your wallet. Then the grocery store bills the government $60 in federal protein subsidies for your steak purchase, and the government covers the cost of the subsidy with the taxes you paid.

In which story is ribeye steak cheaper? Is 40+60 less than 100? Because that’s exactly what shit-for-brains Alex Padilla is telling you, spitting in your face with a calculated distortion of obvious reality.

Of course, the program costs for our hypothetical federal protein subsidies add another $50 per transaction, and subsidies lead to price increases as sellers see that there’s more cash available for people buying their product behind a set of subsidy-hidden costs that make purchases less price sensitive, so the story above is cheating a bit. But the problem remains. If the cost of something stays the same, but is split between different parties that all pay for parts of the same thing, the cost isn’t lowered. It’s shamefully dishonest to pretend that it is, and it’s shamefully dishonest to pretend that the removal of the subsidies raises the cost. The people telling this story know what they’re doing. They’re lying on purpose, with full awareness of the lie.

And it just goes on and on. There are several related and equally deliberate lies being shotgunned into the discourse, like this museum-quality piece of sociopathy (and do note the ratios on all of these linked and screenshotted posts):

Yes, the promises made about Obamacare were always very modest. It was a very minor and limited piece of legislation that wasn’t really supposed to have much of an effect, you see. That’s why all of the news coverage was so restrained, treating passage of the Affordable Care Act as a minor development from GOD-KING BARACK THE GLORIOUS LIGHTBRINGER, SON OF HISTORY:

If you believe any of this at all, and for crying out loud how could you, spend a few minutes watching the late John Dingell as he explained in 2009 what this magical new law was going to do:

I’m a John Dingell hipster: I hated John Dingell before it was cool. This speech is everything Democrats said the Affordable Care Act was going to be. It’ll aggressively control healthcare spending as a share of GDP, permanently ending the cost problem. It’ll make your insurance premiums much lower. It’ll cover everyone, 96%+ of the country, immediately. And, from the time-stamped transcript:

Friend, once you have Obamacare, you’ll never again have to worry about health insurance bureaucrats rejecting a course of treatment your doctor wishes to pursue. Say goodbye to preauthorizations and denied claims. That’s definitely happened, right?

Here we are, fifteen years later, and these absolute scumbags are pretending that they never said any of this. And also, Obamacare — the actual law of the land, the giant piece of legislation that massively reshaped healthcare in America — can’t possibly be blamed for current healthcare costs, because that was, like, I mean, such a long time ago.

Obamacare? That old thing? Why, wasn’t that passed back in practically the olden times or something?

The level of shamelessness in the current campaign of organized lying is uniquely insulting, even by the usual standards of American politics.