Because candidates are vying for every vote, they try to present everything they can to the American public that will instill confidence in their campaign—even if it means manipulating the “facts” presented by each campaign. Many have a sense that each candidate will cite facts and statistics that are favorable to their platform, but when caught up in a whirlwind of politics, an ongoing war, a failing economy, and the stress of everyday life, do people remember this little piece of common sense?
Kevin Sack, a writer for the New York Times, stresses in his article "On Health Plans, the Numbers Fly" that people must be more discerning of the candidates because their “ideal” plans actually may not transfer to an “ideal” budget or care for the “ideal” amount of Americans as seen in the case of each candidate’s health care plans. In Sack’s article, Dr. Uwe E. Reinhardt, a health economist from Princeton, recognizes that the campaigns use the best numbers to produce the solid proof that their plans will truly take care of the people. Reinhardt, along with a number of economists believes that voters would be “wise to tune out all the competing numbers and focus instead on the philosophical underpinnings of the candidates’ plans.” However, what about the undecided voters? If the ideas and “philosophical underpinnings of the candidate’s plans” isn’t enough, how do they choose who to vote for when they can’t compare plans and numbers? If we can’t even have a genuinely close estimate of numbers, are we just left with unsubstantiated ideals?
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I really like your post because it points to a major problems in American politics: voters don't pay close enough attention and are easily manipulated.
Fortunately, there are groups like factcheck.org that hold politicians accountable, but most voters still don't do the research to find out who is being factually honest.
In my opinion, the problem is actually bigger than apathy and stems in part from our broken education system. Students are taught to memorize important statistics and pieces of information, but we are not taught to look at the big picture and see how these things fit together. This results in a general public that is easily manipulated by statistics because we don't have a general sense of what is and isn't realistic. I wish more classes stopped making students memorize statistics and started asking them to grasp generalities.
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