Cruz Was Right on Obamacare & Jobs

In 2009, PolitiFact ruled that Barack Obama’s infamous “if you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan” promise was “ half-true.” In 2013, they reversed themselves and declared it a lie. The “Lie of the Year,” no less. Again in 2013, PolitiFact (with a little help from yours truly) was forced to reverse another ill-considered ruling that benefited Obamacare supporters. Now PolitiFact is at it again, ruling that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is pants-on-fire lying when he says Obamacare is the nation’s “biggest job-killer.” The ruling is likely to get a lot more coverage now that Cruz finished first in the Iowa GOP presidential caucuses ahead of Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, and the rest of the GOP field. Whether you like Cruz or not, he has the better of this dispute.  In their rush to label Ted Cruz a liar, PolitiFact ignored economic theory, ignored economic consensus, ignored problems with the evidence they had amassed, ignored that some of the evidence they collected supports Cruz, ignored reams of anecdotal evidence, and dismissed Congressional Budget Office projections based on nothing more than a subjective and arbitrary distinction PolitiFact themselves invented.