Fox News Viewers Again found to be the most misinformed.

Not that you would know it if hit you in the head, but I suggest you go back through the postings and you will find your question answered.

I repeat myself, go back and read the study. The study was valid. And the results have not been legitimately challenged. There is no problem with the method or protocols surrounding the study.

The problem is that you do not like the results. As I and others have tried to convey to you that the CBO issue you are trying to raise is a false issue. Respondents in this survey were asked if they knew what the CBO's position was on an issue. And they didn't know. They were misinformed.

Yes, I think it is very clear you are going to believe what ever the heck you want to believe regardless of the facts.

 

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BS

Joe, read the article, THEY WERE NOT ASKED THE CBO POSITION, the actual questions are in the blocks in the article and they DO NOT MENTION THE CBO, they specifically mention "economists who have studied the issue....."

Arthur

 

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The CBO is, by charter, a non-partisan, objective body charged with economic analysis of federal policies. To that end, they employ a staff of hundreds of economists and public policy professionals, most with advanced degrees in economics. Additionally, they maintain an economic advisory staff that reads like a who's-who of the country's economics community:

http://www.cbo.gov/aboutcbo/econadvisers.cfm

If there is some substantial variance between what the mainstream of economists think, and what the CBO has said, then we'd expect to have heard about it. Your position is strongly premised on such a claim - how about you produce some evidence for it? As of yet, there is no basis in evidence for your insistence that the CBO misrepresents the mainstream opinion of the country's economics and policy establishment.

Misinformed as to what the mainstream opinion of the country's economics and policy establishment is, that is. Not seeing anything controversial about that.

Irrelevant - the subject is simple knowledge of what the CBO says to begin with. You have to possess that, to be able to disagree in the first place.

Supposing you do actually know what the CBO positions you are disagreeing with are, that would actually go to the point of the survey (which is that FOX viewers are systematically misinformed as to what the CBO statements are in the first place).

Since you (apparently) know what the CBO has and hasn't said, you would not count among the misinformed in question here.

Not sure why you're trying to defend FOX News viewers who don't know what they're talking about.

 

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So, again, you are insisting that there is some major variance between CBO projections and the opinions of "most economists who have studied the issue."

Where can we see evidence of this variance? Or is this simply an invention of your own, introduced for rhetorical convenience?

Or are you actually a cunning troll giving a brilliant object lesson in the inanity of the survey respondants at issue?

 

LOL, is that the best you can do? Others who read the study got it. They understood what was being said in the study. However, the truth seems to consistently elude you. The study was not about the CBO. It was about people being misinformed by news sources.

This reminds me of the days when you were defending that candidate who was a witch but not a witch. You stretch the bounds of credibility to the breaking point in order to defend indefensible right wing whacko positions and claims.

 

No, it's not up to me to prove a negative.

YOU made the assertion that they are the same so YOU need to show they are the same.

More importantly, that's not what I was arguing.

The POINT is that one can hold a position on the likelyhood of a PROJECTION, that is not the same as the CBO's, and that doesn't make it WRONG, since the CBO is not always right.

Arthur

 

Exactly, whenever the CBO's findings are in the Republicans favor they don't hesitate to cite them as an unbiased credible source. Just as they did during the healtchare debate especially.

 

Yeah it is funny how that works.

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When the CBO numbers favor the Republican political agenda, the CBO is gospel. And when the CBO numbers do not favor the Republican political agenda, the CBO numbers are worthless, inacurate, etc.

 

No negatives in question here. You have made the (extraordinary) assertion that the mainstream of relevant economists and scientists disagrees with the CBO's projections. That's an existential positive - that two distinct positions exist - and it's up to you to substantiate it, or drop it.

I have provided reasonable grounds for such a conclusion in a previous post. If you don't want to dispute them, or otherwise substantiate your own position, then I consider this point to have been conceded by you, and the present tactics to be a childish diversion.

Moreover, you are asking me to prove an existential negative here (that there does not exist a significant body of relevant economists who disagree).

For about the 10th time in this thread, that's irrelevant. The question of whether the CBO is ultimately accurate or not was not a part of the survey. The questions had to do with what the content of the CBO's projections are, as such. And FOX viewers are systematically misinformed about that - they can't even participate in the conversation you want to have about the reliability of the CBO, because they don't even know what the CBO is saying in the first place.

 

I know, it's worse than that, they used the CBO conslusion to represtent TRUTH, no need to wait to find out if they are in fact correct.

NO THEY DID NOT.

Would you at least READ the study before claiming what they asked about?????

http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/pdf/dec10/Misinformation_Dec10_quaire.pdf

Not a SINGLE question even mentions the CBO.

NOT ONE

No one was asked about what the CBO was saying.

The questions they were asked were quite GENERAL in nature about what some mythical group of ECONOMISTS think:

So in reality no one actually knows what the REAL answer to those questions is? How would you even go about finding out?

The fact is, they took the CBO's position as EQUAL to the phrase "ECONOMISTS", and thus the reason the survey is bogus.

If they REALLY wanted to know if the respondents knew what the CBO had said, then they should have ASKED what the CBO said?

They didn't

Arthur

 

Prove it. Produce some considerable body of relevant economists that disagrees. I'm not seeing them.

Nobody else has evinced any problem with the premise of taking CBO positions as representative of the economics community, on partinent issues. The CBO was designed precisely to produce such an alignment of opinion, and has a good reputation for doing such. If you have some grounds on which to argue that the CBO is unrepresentative of the relevant mainstream of economic opinion, I'm all ears.

 

You mean like how Einstein disagreed with the positions of the mainstream physicists community?

Concensus does not equal being correct.

Not only is it total Bullshit but you are eating it with a fucking soup spoon.

LOL

Arthur

 

Lots of people do. Not Fox viewers, though - they don't. Worse than that, they harbor actual errors in the matter - they believe falsehoods. How did that happen?

You seem fixated on whether the CBO and the mainstream community of economists is "correct" or not. No one is talking about that. It is not an issue in this thread.

 

Last post:

If they REALLY wanted to know if the respondents knew what the CBO had said, then they should have ASKED what the CBO said?

They didn't

 

The Congressional Budget Office, Department of Commerce, National Academy of Sciences, were among the sources of data compared with opinions of respondents. WorldPublicOpinion.org was not trying to establish these viewers' awareness of the CBO in this poll. As already noted, the findings included the following:

As iceaura noted, your fixation on respondents' knowledge of CBO assessments is not relevant- CBO data is simply being compared with the opinions polled.

 

Even ignoring the issue of whether or not the CBO represents "most economists," (which it does, by the way) the study still showed that FOX News viewers are much more misinformed. There was plenty of stuff in the study that didn't have anything to do with the CBO; consensus among scientists on climate change (of course, I wouldn't put it past adoucette to demand that I prove that peer-reviewed scientific journals really do represent the consensus among most scientists), tax cuts in the stimulus legislation, Republicans opposing TARP, etc.

 

Actually this is one of the most poorly done studies I've ever seen.

For instance:
It asks: Since January 2009 have your Federal income taxes:
Gone up, stayed the same, gone down...

Then it puts them in the misinformed catagory if they answered:
Their own income taxes have gone up (14 points),

LOL

My income taxes have gone up since 2009, so how am I misinformed?

Arthur

 

Income taxes did indeed go down for 97% of households since 2009. So while it's not quite 100% certain that a person who answered that his income taxes had gone up was incorrect, it's 97% certain. That 3% uncertainty is inside the 3.4% margin of error for the survey.

So while I would agree that you can't be certain that any particular person's answer was incorrect, you can make valid statistical generalizations about large groups of respondents, assuming proper sampling procedure is followed.

 

That's only true if their income was unchanged between 2009 and 2010.

The fact is the question was POORLY worded.

It should have asked if the percent you were paying went up or down.

What's more is the questions were asked in November and at that time a bunch of important tax breaks that had expired in 2009 had NOT been re-instated, and so at the time the questions were asked, the answer would have been YES for a lot of people.

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Taxes/Advice/congress-lets-50-tax-breaks-expire.aspx

They weren't re-instated until December.

The question on Climate Change was also pretty ambiguous, using a term of uncertain meaning.

It didn't ask what "Scientists who studied the Climate" thought, it just said scientists, and it used the very vague term "Climate Change" instead of a much more precise term like "Anthropogenic Global Warming" or "Warming caused by increased atmospheric CO2"

For instance the term "Climate Change" could be taken to mean a far more radical change in the climate than what we are experiencing.

 

LOL, ok so first you question the accuracy of the CBO. And that was throughly debunked. So now you are questioning the integrity of the University of Maryland Study.

The bottom line is that the survey was fairly worded and understandable to most people. In any survey you are going to have a poor ability to understand and use the language. And that fact is accounted for in the sampling.

So you are yet again barking up a tree with no raccoon. Fox News is not even making your arguements in defense of itself. Your credibility died a long time ago Arthur.