Debating A Pathological Liar on CNBC
". . .There are a bunch of desperate lies in just this one exchange. There is the sky-is-not-blue lie about the minimum wage supposedly hurting job growth (a lie) and hurting low-income workers (a blatant lie). Then, cornered, Stossel tries to change the subject. When he can't, he resorts to another lie, claiming I have written something on his Amazon page (I did proudly call him a pathological liar on the Huffington Post, but not on his Amazon page - you can check here).
Then, in a crescendo of dishonesty appropriate for a pathological liar, Stossel reaches for the first liberal economist that comes to his mind (in this case Robert Reich) and claims that the data about states, wages and job growth are from just "one study" from Reich and that this supposed "one study" has been "widely discredited by every serious economist who looked at this." Of course, none of this is from a "study" - it's the cold, hard fact, gleaned from simple arithmetic: states that have raised their minimum wage above the federal level have created jobs at a better clip than those that have not.
Unfortunately, Stossel uses both his perch at ABC News and the conservative movement's right-wing apparatus to promote these kinds of lies. He gets awards from right-wing groups, and is given a platform at corporate-funded, fringe-right-wing groups like Townhall.com and the Cato Institute. He is, in short, a good exmaple of why I wrote Hostile Takeover - because we have to start fighting back frontally against these professional pathological liars, and the first way to start fighting back is to start shoving the facts in their faces."
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