You missed the part where I said "barely true" didn't you?
I'm just a computer programmer, where the only options available to me are TRUE or FALSE, so please explain to me how "barely true" is not the same as "true".
There is such a thing as a half-truth and less than that afterall. I already said that I'm more than willing to chalk this one example up to a poor judgment call. And I'm unwilling to conclude that Politifact is an unreliable fact-checker on the basis of one iffy judgment call.
I'll grant that I haven't seen much of the work of Politifact, but what I've seen has not inspired confidence. Not because I disagree, but because they seem to be substantially blurring the line between fact and opinion. A site like factcheck.org (or snopes.com) will often use terms like "undetermined" or "indeterminate" for those things that have both evidence for and against. In addition, they try (as much as possible) to limit themselves to an actual
determination of fact, keeping opinion out as much as possible. If there are varying opinions, then likely it
isn't a matter of objective fact.
For instance, the Rand Paul statement about federal employee compensation that they branded a lie came from a speech where Rand Paul was making the point that federal employees have substantially higher compensation than private employees do (the broader truth he was trying to point out) and to do so he gave specific average total compensation numbers for private and federal employees(the specific truth). Politifact labelled it as a lie,
not because it wasn't actually true, but because some people might misunderstand the statement. If a site like snopes.com or factcheck.org did the piece, they would likely have said something alone of lines of:
VERDICT
explanation of context in which the statement was made
explanation of difference between salary and total compensation
explanation of actual numbers for federal and private employees for BOTH total compensation and for salary only
explanation for how well the specific statement in question, (and the verdict about the factuality) supported the broader point of the speaker
Notice that the Politifact article didn't come close to that. The word "Fact" has a very specific meaning, and while the word "opinion" is not an antonym of the word "fact", it surely isn't a synonym either.
So, the writer of the article should be expected to withhold his/her opinion on a complicated issue because...?
No need to withhold his/her opinion (outside of the fact checking article itself - opinion has no place in a
fact check article), but the opinion of the writer has no bearing on whether a
fact is true or not. That's kindof the definition of the word "fact".
As Lurker pointed out, Bachman is leaving the impression that Social Security is kaput. The numbers that you provide show that they are, indeed, borrowing. However, this is such a minuscule amount that we shouldn't even be concerned with it. Especially when the numbers you provided show that total assets have grown since January 2009. This hardly backs up Bachman's claim that Social Security is "out of money".
I'm focusing here on the "total assets have grown since January 2009" part. That is Not even wrong
WP for the simple reason that you cannot divide by zero.
There are no assets in the Social Security Trust Fund. None. There are IOUs that can be redeemed at the US Treasury by the Social Security Trust Fund for a net governmental gain of exactly 0 dollars. The treasury, in cashing in those IOUs, will
write itself a check.
Go ahead, write yourself an IOU for $50,000,000, redeem that IOU (from yourself!) by then writing yourself a check (from your own bank account) for $50,000,000. Have you come out ahead?
