Data? We Don’t Need No Stinking Data!

By BJ Bjornson

It’s little wonder that Republicans are always the ones leading the charge against evolution and looking for creationism being taught in the schools, the whole idea of empirical evidence just doesn’t figure into their worldview. Steve Benen points to an article by Bruce Bartlett, who looks at Reagan’s proposal of the largest peacetime tax increase in American history. Not surprisingly, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page and guys like Newt Gingrich predicted disaster. Instead, the data indicates it actually spurred growth.

As Steve notes, when Clinton raised taxes, the same song was sung, and the economy did the exact opposite of what they predicted. When Bush got into power and they were allowed to pursue their tax cutting agenda, which they assured everyone would produce sustained growth and balanced budgets, instead led to record deficits and the only growth was phantom financials that are now in the process of unravelling.

Now that Obama looks to raise taxes back to Clinton-era levels, the same old song-and-dance is coming from the same old quarters.

One would like to think that being wrong, over and over again, about the exact same issue, might lead some of these characters to back off. Likewise, one might also like to think that major news outlets, recognizing how wrong these folks have been for the last few decades, might stop taking their prognostications seriously. Alas, this is not the case.

The Republicans at least have the excuse of ideological blinders blocking their view of reality. The major media, on the other hand, have no such excuse, (excepting Fox News, of course).

I often wonder if this is part of the reason Republicans and their allies are so keen to push creationism into the science curriculum as though its an actual alternative to real science, as a way to train the next generation to treat unsubstantiated and often contradicted crap as though it were of equal legitimacy with conclusions drawn from real life data and experiments. That way, they can continue to convince people to listen to their failed economics polices that are contradicted by the available data as though they are a legitimate part of the debate.

Economics may not be a hard science, but neither should it be a faith-based initiative. It is doubtful the Republican faithful will ever figure that out, but one can hope enough Americans figure it out to keep them out of power until they can began accepting their folly rather than re-implementing it.

Comments

[Kat]

It’s little wonder that Republicans are always the ones leading the charge against evolution and looking for creationism being taught in the schools, the whole idea of empirical evidence just doesn’t figure into their worldview.

With my bold...

"I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history COULD be truthfully written. In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that ‘facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost everyone. If you look up the history of the last war in, for instance, the ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA, you will find that a respectable amount of the material is drawn from German sources. A British and a German historian would disagree deeply on many things, even on fundamentals, but there would still be that body of, as it were, neutral fact on which neither would seriously challenge the other. It is just this common basis of agreement, with its implication that human beings are all one species of animal, that totalitarianism destroys. Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as ‘the truth’ exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as ‘Science’. There is only ‘German Science’, ‘Jewish Science’, etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but THE PAST. If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’ — well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five — well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs — and after our experiences of the last few years that is not a frivolous statement."

George Orwell