• mozz@mbin.grits.dev
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    1 month ago

    Hold the fuck up

    This has got to be wrong

    The IRA alone was a trillion dollars, roughly speaking, in new “social and economic spending”. Where is that on this chart?

    I’m gonna do some digging and see what this is. My guess is that “social and economic spending” is cunningly defined as within certain existing programs, which took a back seat to the massive new programs which are not included, but let me see what I can find about it.

    Edit: Yeah, I’m pretty sure this is 100% just made up numbers. Like literally just writing any random shit on the chart and bald faced lying that it’s the actual numbers. He has citations, but they’re all citations to other articles of his.

    Here are the numbers:

    Military spending is easy to measure, because it’s a whole separate slice in the infographic. It went up, but not to where he says – over those three years it went from $742B to $751B to $805B. His chart shows it climbing up way up to $900B.

    Social spending is a little more complex, because it’s not a single category in the same way, but you can literally add up things that are separated on the chart and see that even the sum of selected social/economic programs adds up to more than he says. I knew this was wrong because the scale of social spending, under Biden or before him, was so massive that you don’t even have to get detailed to show why it’s wrong.

    • 2022: Student loan programs + income security + medicaid + medicare + social security = $3.6 trillion
    • 2023: Income security + medicaid + medicare + social security = $3.3 trillion

    He doesn’t really break down what he means by “economic and social,” so maybe he’s using a definition that doesn’t include social security or student loan forgiveness in social and economic spending or something, but given the fact that he lied about military spending I feel fairly comfortable saying that he probably just made up some random shit and posted up a chart full of Fox News style total lies.