July 18^th

Today the local paper has some material from Factcheck.org about the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and various politicians’ misleading comments (lies?) about it. The liar-in-chief is Ted Cruz. In a Yahoo news interview Katie Couric asked Cruz what would happen to the 16.4 million people on Medicaid if the law were repealed as Cruz had recommended. Cruz claimed that they would be better off because “health outcomes are remarkably worse when people get on Medicaid. And in fact people’s life expectancy goes down when they get on Medicaid.” The evidence from a study co-authored by a member of President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors about the difference between mortality in states that expanded Medicaid coverage and those that did not is exactly the opposite.

Cruz has a very difficult time with the truth when the truth is inconvenient for him. His comments about the IRS are a case in point: Cruz claimed that the 110 thousand IRS agents should be sent to guard the border. But Ted there aren’t 110 thousand IRS agents; there aren’t even 110 thousand IRS employees, there are just 82 thousand IRS employees. Of these 82 thousand employees just 14 thousand are IRS agents. That comes to about one agent for every 17 thousand tax returns.

Then we have Ted’s comments about his wife’s attitude toward the family’s finances and their allocation toward his campaign. In an interview Ted was asked about his wife Heidi’s willingness to use the family finances in his presidential campaign. He claims that he asked his wife if they should convert all of their family assets to cash and contribute that to his campaign and that he “was astonished when she said absolutely.” On the other hand Heidi describes the situation very differently. Heidi, you understand, is no financial patsy. She gave up a very promising career at Goldman–Sachs to help with her husband’s campaign. She claims that she insisted that they first solicit financial support from others to see if support of a Cruz candidacy existed. Then if the family finances were required to guarantee the nomination they would contribute it. Gee, why isn’t Heidi running for President?

When Cruz’s utterances are Factchecked he has the highest “pants on fire” rating of any candidate except for Ben Carson. Cruz is at 56 percent. Many observers are not convinced that Cruz even knows that he is lying. There are mental mechanisms that convince the very passionate that what they want to believe is, in fact, the truth. There is no tabula rasa for these folks; every belief is preprogrammed.