Why do they lie so much?

I hate winter. I hate the gray days, the bare trees and the cold. But another thing I really hate about winter is that the radio station I normally listen to both going and coming back from work each day, AM 1310, doesn't come in at all during the 'night time' hours of winter.

I usually listen to Bill Press in the morning and Ed Schultz in the afternoon commute. But when daylight savings time ends and it gets dark at 5 PM and is fairly dark during the ride in, I'm relegated to listening to Bill Bennett on WAAM 1600 in the morning and Sean Hannity on Detroit's 50,000-watt blowtorch, WJR 760 AM, in the late afternoon.

Two days in a row now, Sean Hannity has flat-out lied to his listeners. Yesterday he said Ronald Reagan started his first term with a 'worse recession than Barack Obama' and that the unemployment rate 'was double-digits when he took office'. Today Hannity said that 'defense spending is the only spending Barack Obama has cut'.

Now, all three of you know what's coming, don't you? You've read this blog enough to know that the proof, along with the documentation of that 'proof', is surely coming. Those are the simple facts -- and you know it.

For starters, unemployment was 7.5% in January 1981 when Reagan began his first term. You can follow that link below to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and pop in the year '1981' and that graph below is your result.

Year Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
1981 7.5 7.4 7.4 7.2 7.5 7.5 7.2 7.4 7.6 7.9 8.3 8.5

As you can see, Hannity is lying when he says Reagan began his term with double-digit unemployment. It was 7.5% and in fact, it went down to 7.2% in July 1981 and then sky-rocketed to 9.8% by July 1982 (pop in '1982') and then was double-digit from September 1982 until June 1983 -- a full 2 1/2 years after Reagan took office.

And by the way, there wasn't a recession in January 1981 when Reagan took office either. There was a very small recession that ended six months before he took office and then a very large and serious one known as the 'Reagan Recession' that he helped create six month into office, that lasted from July 1981 until November 1982.

Did you notice how unemployment was double-digits for eight months (11/82-6/83) after the Reagan Recession? That, unemployment being a lagging indicator, is what we are experiencing now coming out of the Great 2007-2009 Bush Recession.

And what was Hannity's other lie? Oh yeah, 'Barack Obama has cut only defense spending'. That's not true. Obama's first budget was the 2010 budget and he increased military spending by 4%.

They don't have an argument if they tell the truth.