Paul Ryan misspeaks, an accuracy check

[cumrag27]

Fact Check: Paul Ryan's Jimmy Carter Comments​

GREENVILLE, N.C. - Paul Ryan is not only the GOP vice presidential nominee, he's also the House Budget Chair, and obsessed with data and numbers, but despite his passion for math, some numbers he threw out with a new attack line today need some fact checking.

Let's start at the beginning. In comparing President Obama to Jimmy Carter, Ryan said in July 1980 the unemployment rate was 7.8 percent and "for the past 42 months it's been above 8 percent under Barack Obama's failed leadership."

Both parts of this sentence are true according to the Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics, but in July 1983, when Ronald Reagan was president, unemployment was at 9.4 percent. In July 1982 it was higher at 9.8 percent.

In July 1992, when George H.W. Bush was president, unemployment was at 7.7 percent.

Is what Ryan said factually correct? Yes, but it leaves out some important data.

The next statement Ryan made was that in 1980 "330,000 businesses filed for bankruptcy. Last year, under President Obama's failed leadership, 1.4 million businesses field for bankruptcy."

This is not true. According to American Bankruptcy Institute, under Carter 331,264 businesses and non-businesses filed for bankruptcy. That number includes not just businesses, but personal bankruptcies as well. In 1980, there were 43,694 business bankruptcies and 287, 570 non-business bankruptcies.

Ryan also got it wrong with regard to the number of business bankruptcies last year. In 2011, there were 1, 410, 653 total bankruptcies. Of that number 47,806 were business bankruptcies and 1,362,847 were non-business bankruptcies.

So did he misspeak or purposefully manipulate the data to make it sound worse?

"He obviously misspoke, but it's still an apples to apples comparison," Ryan spokesman Brendan Buck said. "The point remains: bankruptcies are up dramatically under President Obama compared to the Carter years."

Yet it's important to note that bankruptcies are down dramatically under President Obama, compared to the Bush years.

Business bankruptcies hit a record 71,549 in 1991, when George H.W. Bush was president, second only to 1985, under Reagan, when 71,277 businesses filed.

A record number of Americans - more than 2 million - filed for personal bankruptcy in 2005.

Ryan's next line looks to be correct: "Take a look at people who are having a hard time making their mortgage payments: 77,000 delinquent mortgages by the time Jimmy Carter left office; under President Obama, 3 million."

According to the Mortgage Bankers Association, in the third quarter of 1980 there were 76,885 delinquent mortgages, while in the second quarter of this year there were 3,107,247.

Politicians are known to both misspeak and fudge the data, but not all are as close to the numbers as Ryan, who in Congress studies them himself, instead of leaning on aides to do it for him.

ABC News' Susanna Kim, Elizabeth Hartfield, and Chris Good contributed to this report


Stimpy

 

[another1]

on the subject of ryan. i wonder what action the representative of town with a major auto plant about to close, did?
when he saw friends of a lifetime about to lose their jobs, what did he urge the then bush administration to do?
i wonder what bills he introduced to help his friends, his constituents?

 

[cumrag27]

Paul Ryan's self-inflicted Marathon-gate

Paul Ryan’s marathon puffery matters less than his convention whopper.​

By Walter Shapiro Yahoo News

The cliché that “a presidential campaign is a marathon not a sprint” dates back to at least to Michael Dukakis in 1988—and probably much earlier than that. But never before has a marathon itself emerged as a character issue in a presidential race. All that changed when Paul Ryan boasted to radio host Hugh Hewitt that his personal best marathon time was “under three, high twos. I had a two hour and fifty-something.”

At first, this seemed like another minor physical fitness detail that fit into the gush about the Republican veep nominee’s hotness. Ryan is, after all, the kind of anti-pork politician prone to brag that his body fat is between six and eight percent. His P90x workout routine undoubtedly is better known than his position on overhauling Medicare. The toned and honed abs of Romney’s second banana have become an obsession in certain circles as New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser warbled about “Ryan’s rocking body.”

But while Ryan’s buff-itude seems genuine (at least until the rumors of a stunt double begin), his marathon times turn out to be fishier than Bill Clinton’s golf scores. When challenged by Runner’s World, the New Yorker and other publications, Ryan eventually backed off and admitted in a statement that “if I were to do any rounding, it would be to four hours, not three.” In short, Ryan’s sub-three-hour marathon disappeared in a few quick strides and a cloud of dust.

It seems implausible that Romney’s running mate could have so badly misremembered his running time, even if the race was the hitherto obscure 1990 Grandma’s Marathon in Duluth, Minn. (I am no runner, but I can accurately recite from memory every statistic that I compiled as a 13-year-old playing Pony League baseball).

Does Marathon-gate matter? I suppose you can concoct a slippery slope in which a political leader who will fib about his sporting achievements might also dissemble about whether Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction.

But I have my own, more benign theory about Ryan’s Hype. A month ago as House Budget chairman, Ryan lacked a mass following beyond Wisconsin, Capitol Hill and conservative idea mavens. Now he is either destined for the vice presidential mansion or becomes anointed as a frontrunner for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. That sort of dramatic liftoff can mess with any politician’s sense of self (see Palin, Sarah). Entranced with the fawning coverage of his physical fitness mania, Ryan, I suspect, felt the need to embellish his running story for no political purpose beyond feeding his own ego.

What troubles me far more about Ryan’s honesty is the story he told last Wednesday night in his convention acceptance speech about the closing of the General Motors plant in his hometown of Janesville. The VP nominee linked a 2008 Obama campaign speech in Janesville expressing the hope that the factory would last for a century with GM shuttering the plant within a year. The obvious implication was that Obama’s economic policies as president led to laid-off factory workers in Ryan’s home town.

There was one problem: The time sequence proves nothing of the sort. Obama made his hyperbolically hopeful comments about the Janesville GM facility in February 2008. Four months later, just as Obama was nailing down the presidential nomination, the beleaguered automaker announced that it would close the plant. Almost all the production at the factory halted on Dec. 23, 2008, when GM laid off 1,200 workers and stopped making SUVs. Twenty-eight days later, Obama was inaugurated as president. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel unequivocally concluded that the GM story was “false.”

What baffles me about Ryan is why he told that grotesquely misleading story during his star-spangled turn at the Republican convention. It was just a few throwaway lines in a speech—and certainly truthful Wisconsin examples could have been found to illustrate economic hardship while Obama has been in the White House. Ryan both intimately understood the chronology and should have assumed that his remarks would be fact-checked.

Truth-telling does matter in political campaigns, even if “fact” has become a subset of “spin.” Athletes might occasionally exaggerate their exploits to impress listeners, but it requires a different form of hypocrisy knowingly to tell a whopper about your home town in the biggest speech of your political career.


Stimpy

 

[joninliverton]

Who's Paul Ryan

 

[rbar]

Who's Paul Ryan

Romneys chosen running mate. He might just be a bigger piece of shit than Mitt...