Taxpayer money was spent on
this? If WorldPublicOpinion.org were better informed, then they could do better studies. And if they used something other than official Nancy Pelosi propaganda as an information source, they'd be better informed.
The study, "Misinformation and the 2010 Election: A Study of the U.S. Electorate," came out last week from a group at the University of Maryland called WorldPublicOpinion.org. The report's authors say they found "strong evidence that voters were substantially misinformed on many of the issues prominent in the election campaign." One of those issues was health care.
The authors base their argument on an estimate from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), made during the health care debate, that said Obamacare would reduce the federal deficit, if only by a little. The researchers found that 75 percent of those surveyed don't believe it -- they think Obamacare will actually increase the deficit. How could that be?
The answer is they were allegedly misled by Fox News (where, by the way, I am a contributor). "Those who watched Fox News almost daily were significantly more likely than those who never watched it to believe that...the health care law will worsen the deficit," the authors conclude.
But maybe something else was going on. Perhaps the voters knew the CBO based its estimate on dubious assumptions -- say, the likelihood of funding Obamacare by cutting $500 billion from Medicare -- forced on it by Congress. Or perhaps voters knew that the top actuary of Medicare and Medicaid disagreed with the CBO. Or perhaps the "misinformed" voters held the commonsense belief that you cannot cover 32 million previously uncovered people and save money at the same time. The bottom line is, it is entirely reasonable to believe that Obamacare, if put into effect in the real world, will increase the deficit.
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/politics/2010/12/its-not-fox-news-fault-obamacare-bad-law#ixzz18koP1YHC
1 Comments:
People who watched FOX almost everyday wrongly believed that:
most economists estimate the stimulus caused job losses
most economists have estimated the health care law will worsen the deficit
the economy is getting worse
most scientists do not agree that climate change is occurring
the stimulus legislation did not include any tax cuts
their own income taxes have gone up
the auto bailout only occurred under Obama
when TARP came up for a vote most Republicans opposed it
and that it is not clear that Obama was born in the United States
conclusion's based on these sources:
the Congressional Budget Office, the Department of Commerce, and the National Academy of Sciences. We also noted efforts to survey elite opinion, such as the regular survey of economists conducted by the Wall Street Journal;
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