John Stossel (ABC Neocon) Gets Powned!

[Nbadan]

KUDLOW: All right. John Stossel, author of "Myths, Lies and Downright Stupidity" and Dave Sirota, author of "Hostile Takeover." We're going to look at the minimum wage. According to Mr. Stossel, the myth is: A higher minimum wage helps workers. The truth is: A higher minimum wage helps some workers but hurts others. John, your thought.

Mr. STOSSEL: We all want to raise people's wages, but assuming the government can just set the wage is--better than supply and demand--is such nonsense. It assumes every employer has a fixed number of workers. But we don't have people washing windshields in gas station anymore because the minimum wage makes it foolish to hire a kid, to give an entry level worker a shot.

KUDLOW: This thing's back in Congress. A lot of states are either passing it or discussing it. How many people get the minimum wage across the country? This is a data from your own book.

Mr. STOSSEL: Three percent.

KUDLOW: Bingo. Dave Sirota, 3 percent, and it hurts some people. What's your take?

Mr. SIROTA: Well, listen, John, I would encourage you stop reciting these dishonest talking points and the chatter you're hearing on the cocktail party circuit because the stats don't bear that out in any way at all. And here are the stats that you cannot dispute. In states that have raised the minimum wage, above the federal level, those states have created jobs at a far faster rate than the states that have not. That is because, when you raise the minimum wage, you put money into the pockets of people who will spend it and it spurs the economy. Now, that might not be heard in your book which purports to debunk lies, but those are the facts.

Mr. STOSSEL: Well, if those are the facts, why stop at $7. We should pay everybody 20 bucks, 40 bucks an hour. Then we'll really have buying power. It's just...

Mr. SIROTA: You're changing the subject. You're changing the subject because you know you're wrong.

Mr. STOSSEL: Well, the study side, and I now realize who you are because you, on my Amazon page, he came on and said, `I'm a smarmy-looking liar.'

Mr. SIROTA: You are.

Mr. STOSSEL: But that one study was from Robert Reich, former employee. And it's been widely discredited by every serious economist who looked at this.

Mr. SIROTA: That's not a study. If you--if you look at the states. Just look at the states. That's not a study. If you look at the states, the states that have raised their minimum wage higher than the federal level have created jobs faster than states that haven't. That's a fact. That's not a study. That's a fact.

Video and Transcript (http://blip.tv/file/42657)

[pussyface]

although Stossel is a tool and often allies himself with the likes of fox news, it is innacurate and unfair to charachterize him as a neocon.

he is not a neo conservative.
that buzz word is not a catchall for everyone you disagree with.

[shelshor]

John Stossel is much closer to being a Libertarian than a neo-Con

[pussyface]

...exactly

[Guru of Nothing]

Personally, I like what John Stossel brings to the table (disclaimer - I have not seen him in many years).

[xrayzebra]

Who is John Stossel and why do I want to know?

[Guru of Nothing]

Who is John Stossel and why do I want to know?

I'll safely assume you don't want to know.

[shelshor]

Who is John Stossel and why do I want to know?
He's one of the very few in the MSM who dare to challenge/contradict that hoary dinosaur "Conventional Wisdom"

[DarkReign]

Powned...tsk tsk tsk

Pwnd

[Ocotillo]

Who is John Stossel and why do I want to know?

He hosts ABC's 20/20 and often let's his libertarian views come through loud and clear in his reporting. He has a piece on the show called "Give me a break" where he will commonly decry some politically correct tenet or conventional wisdom that he deems incorrect.

One other trivial matter, he had the hearing in one ear damaged when he challenged Hulk Hogan in an interview some years back that wrestling was fake and the punches pulled. Hogan hauled off and socked him aside the head and asked if that felt like a pulled punch?

You would probably enjoy the guy Ray. Give him a watch sometime.

[SPARKY]

Mr. SIROTA: Well, listen, John, I would encourage you stop reciting these dishonest talking points and the chatter you're hearing on the cocktail party circuit because the stats don't bear that out in any way at all. And here are the stats that you cannot dispute. In states that have raised the minimum wage, above the federal level, those states have created jobs at a far faster rate than the states that have not. That is because, when you raise the minimum wage, you put money into the pockets of people who will spend it and it spurs the economy. Now, that might not be heard in your book which purports to debunk lies, but those are the facts.

One has to make a few assumptions before accepting Siota's "facts." Rather weak if this is the basis of Stossel being "owned."

[clubalien]

people with low incomes are more likely to spend money than rich that would invest it or give it away to charities.

Government says if we lower taxes it puts more money in to the hands of people to stimulate economy.

this does the saem thing this low income indicuals where they are kids leavign with parents or whatever are most likely to spend this money.

Now rasiing it a little increase the economy and the "growing of the pie" will be much bigger and outpace then the "inflation" effects of rasing raites. taken to an extreme like 3948397439243847 a hour ofcourse is something totaly different. More money in peoples hands means they feel more confertiable spending it. then that next person and spend. I think the idea that rasing a minuim wage can have an impact of growth of the economy.

keep in mind most people don't earn min wage. Even teens working as grocery baggers are likely to get paid above it. Min wage can possible used as a benchmark to mesaure other peoples salaries. I do doubt this because soemone earning 5.5 min wage insted of 5.15. Doesn't seem like it requires soemone making 100,000 demand a increase because of change in somone elses pay where they already get paid substantionally more.

[Nbadan]

although Stossel is a tool and often allies himself with the likes of fox news, it is innacurate and unfair to charachterize him as a neocon.

he is not a neo conservative.
that buzz word is not a catchall for everyone you disagree with.

Stoussel is a Karl Rove tool, so by default that makes him a Neocon enabler.

Here is some truth about John Stoussel:


Stossel's errors are often so obvious that one wonders how they could have ended up on the air. In a 20/20 report on medical research (10/11/99), Stossel complained that too much funding was going to AIDS research, claiming that spending on the disease was "25 times more than on Parkinson's, which kills more people."

In fact, AIDS killed more than 16,000 people in the United States in 1999--down from 43,000 in 1995. Parkinson's, which is not itself generally fatal but contributes to other illnesses, has a mortality rate of 2 per 100,000 to less than 1 per 100,000, depending on the demographic group (BC Medical Journal, 4/01)--which works out to a death toll in the United States of less than 4,000 per year.

Stossel once reported (11/12/99) that "98 percent [of Catholic school students] graduate, vs. 49 percent for the public schools." Actually, according to data from the Department of Education, no state reports a public high school graduation rate as low as Stossel's figure--in 1995-96, the last data available when Stossel made his claim, the rates ranged from 53.2 in the District of Columbia to 89.9 in Vermont (Postsecondary Education Opportunity, 9/99).

What may seem like honest, even careless mistakes are in fact distortions in service of Stossel's agenda. In the first case, Stossel was slamming the "AIDS lobby," who know how to "make money and influence the government," for getting too much government research funding. In the latter example, Stossel's point was that private schools are more efficient than what he calls "government" schools. When Stossel gets a fact wrong, it's nearly always in a way that promotes his ideology.

Wealth & Poverty

At the core of much of Stossel's reporting is his fervent belief in the efficiency and justice of laissez-faire capitalism, and the evils of most forms of government regulation. To Stossel, a fact like persistent U.S. income inequality is merely dogma circulated by lazy journalists who don't know the truth. But it is Stossel's reporting that often gets it backward. In his "Greed" special (2/3/98), Stossel reported that while management compensation had increased in the past 15 years, "that doesn't mean the workers were hurt. Factory wages were up, too--up 70 percent." According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, at the time the show aired, wages for manufacturing workers had risen 55 percent since January 1983. But Stossel's real statistical sleight of hand is that he didn't adjust for inflation. Taking inflation into account--which is indispensable for determining whether "workers were hurt"-- factory workers' real wages fell by more than 6 percent between 1983 and 1998.

Stossel's rhetoric on poverty relies on similarly mistaken statistical formulas. Consider this claim (1/27/01): "America now spends about $40,000 a year on every family of four below the poverty line.... You could just cut them a check for that and they'd be out of poverty." This figure seems to derive from the work of Heritage Foundation welfare analyst Robert Rector, whom Stossel had cited in previous specials. In a 1995 book, Rector calculated that the government spent $324 billion on "welfare." When that number was divided by the number of families then below the poverty line, the result was roughly $40,000. The problem? Rector's number for total "welfare" spending includes programs that go to millions of non-poor families--including spending on Medicare and Medicaid, two of the most expensive government programs. Rector takes this total amount, and then divides this by the number of poor people alone. Such a figure tells you nothing about what benefits to poor people alone actually cost.

Not only do we spend too much on the poor, Stossel claims (9/19/99) that poor Americans enjoy the same access to medical care as the wealthy: "Our system does sometimes fail poor people, but the truth is that when someone is denied care, it makes headlines because it's so unusual."

So unusual? Analyzing data from the 1987 National Medical Expenditure Survey--at a time when fewer Americans lacked health insurance than today--David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler concluded that 945,000 people were unable to receive emergency care that year (American Journal of Public Health, 3/95). Almost two-thirds of those unable to obtain care cited "high costs or lack of insurance." Were there really hundreds of thousands of "headlines" that year about the poor being denied access to basic healthcare?

Much, much more disproving Stoussel's Give Me a Break Here (http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1133)

[Ocotillo]

Another laugher from Stossel was when he defended price gouging during natural disasters. Your liberal media at work again eh.