Worse sin
Asshole Chris Hedges, who occasionally tells the truth, was spewing the usual "progressive" lies on an RT discussion program yesterday. He was saying that the RUSSIAN_MEDDLING shit distracted us from proper criticism of Trump, which is true. But his version of Trump's real actions was false.

Hedges accused Trump of eviscerating Federal agencies, especially EPA.

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Let's look at the fucking facts.

Here's a long-term graph of federal civilian workforce, taken directly from the FRED website.



I used their handy marker device to mark the start of the Trump admin. You can see that Trump hasn't changed the Federal workforce AT ALL.

How about EPA? Here's a graph of EPA workforce since its inception. (Excel here.)



Obama reduced the EPA noticeably, then jumped it up at the end to provide a political weapon against his successor. Trump obligingly pulled down the jumpup.

A closeup of the last few years as numbers:



2018 was the first budget written by the Trump admin. A 4% decrease from the last non-jumped Obama number. Not eviscerated. Obama reduced the workforce by 15%, which is a little closer to evisceration.

Standard shared lies. Repooflicans like to talk about cutting the size of government but usually increase it. Dems like to talk about strengthening the government but usually reduce it.

Asshole Hedges was spewing the standard shared lies under the pretense of countering media lies.

"Correcting" a lie with a lie is a worse sin than the original lie.

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Sidenote: Those sharp peaks on the Fred graph are interesting and unexplained. All are in May or June, which isn't close to the end of the fiscal year. They're quasi-periodic but don't seem to correspond to administrations or parties.

Labels: Shared Lie

  ¶ 1:45 AM