Decision Quality Blog

The current three trillion dollar budget stikes me as an example of public lying of the first order. A shining example of attempting to hide inconvenient facts in plain site. I had this to say about it on another blog.

So why am I going on about this? Besides my general pique, it should stand out as a huge ethical-object lesson. There are all kinds of stories our elected officials tell themselves as to why the do what they do and why they say what they say. Indeed, the same is true for us. We vote for this person or that person largely because of stories we’re told and stories we tell ourselves about the person’s beliefs, values, or maybe credentials.

But what about telling the truth? What happened to that? It’s a pretty simple test actually. If you know something to be one way and you say something different, that’s not telling the truth, regardless of the reasons why you do that. There are fancy academic terms for describing why and how people shade the truth, but the simplest one is “lying.”

This budget is one gigantic lie. A very gigantic lie. “Rosy assumptions” is just a word for lying. Moving numbers out of the equation and “off the books” is lying. Failing to include expenses that you know are coming is lying. Lies, damn lies, and statistics.

Kevin Rants: Bush’s Three Trillion Dollar Lie

kah

Blogged with Flock

Tags: ethics, decision making, budget, deficit, lying