So I dropped by my local pub the other day, and they gave me a ribbing about my fiance. I am not currently engaged, and when my friends asked why they had not been invited to my wedding, I told them that I, too, had not received an invitation. If you relate this to anyone, the only thing you can truthfully tell people is that I posted that. You can prove it by posting a link to this post. Please do, for I have self-esteem issues, which may or may not be true.
The point is, I only have my friends' jokes as evidence to the veracity of their statements. Even though I believe them, I cannot prove that what they said actually occurred. When a business owner says that he is cutting jobs due to Obamacare, that does not actually mean he is cutting jobs due to Obamacare. He may not be cutting jobs at all!
More "Not Necessarily the Truth" below. . .
Businesses warn us not to raise the minimum wage all the time. It'll cost jobs! They tell us. Is it true? History says not so much. Like scientists, I'm going with data. We can't raise taxes on the job creators, they won't create jobs! Okay, I'm actually going to agree with that. I'm just going to quibble with the definition of "Job Creator."
There was a story about Republicans happy about Hillary Clinton's "gaffe" about businesses not creating jobs. They are going to hang that on her like they did with the "You did not build that" comment by President Obama. Science question here: How'd that work out exactly? So, say you start a business. You hire some people and provide goods or services. Without customers, you go belly-up in a hot minute and with that so go the jobs you "created". Customers are the ones who create the jobs.
I have mentioned before the fatal flaw of supply side economics is that demand drives supply- not the other way around. Sure, a tax cut may enable you to offer your better mousetrap to customers for less money, but in a world that doesn't have mice who cares?
A Walmart opens up and hires 100 people. Why? Their business model tells them that this store requires 100 people. If you raise the minimum wage does that change their business model? If you think so, then you think lowering it will cause them to hire more people. I promise you, that if you eliminated the minimum wage, that store would still have 100 employees unless Walmart believed they only needed 99. They may say they'll have to fire workers, but the only provable fact there is that they said it.
Anthony Robbins, yes I am awake at 3 am sometimes and I have been to his seminars, asked a woman if she was attractive and she said yes. Then he asked why she thought that. She responded by saying she'd been told. He asked if it ever occurred to her that the people that told her might be LYING? He was not trying to say she was unattractive. His point was that we give control of that characteristic over to people who may have agendas.
EVERYBODY HAS AN AGENDA! Some agendas are more benign than others. The job of journalists is not to tell us what people say. We have youtube and can watch them actually say it. Journalists need to tell us if the people they report on are telling the truth. There is a ton of data to back up the value of policy. We need to hear about it.