Professor Warren’s claims and the facts:
CLAIM: Professor Warren was part of a group from Harvard that did a study claiming that half of all bankruptcies were due to medical reasons. Note: Warren is for government run healthcare i.e., the single payer system.
The idea that half of all bankruptcies are caused by medical debt has become part of the common folklore. But where did the idea come from? What is the evidence for it? The claim, first made in a 2005 Health Affairsarticle, is at variance with four decades of economic research, including a finding that even large medical bills have no impact on family living standards.
CLAIM: Professor Warren wrote a book in 2003 called “The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents are Going Broke.” In it she “…made the case that income stagnation — caused by failed pro-market policies — is killing the middle class, forcing them to take on ever greater amounts of debt to afford a traditional middle-class lifestyle.”
FACT: Not only is income inequality another myth propagated by the Left but incomes were not stagnant when Elizabeth Warren wrote her book. From The American Enterprise Institute:
Has the middle class stagnated during the past 30 years? I’ve pointed to a pair of Fed studies that show middle-class wages and incomes rising since the 1970s. But CDO disqualify those studies mainly because liberal economist Jared Bernstein says they’re no good. If only there was some economist CDO respected who could back up my claims. Wait, Robert Gordon does! Here is a bit from an email Gordon sent me in 2007:
The correct statement is that correcting the upward bias of the official [consumer price index] adds more than 1 percent per year to official estimates of the growth in median and mean wages. Cumulatively since 1977, my best estimate of the upward bias in the CPI cumulates to 38 percent between 1977 and 2006. Thus if someone came along and said the male median wage adjusted for CPI inflation has been stagnant since 1977, I would translate this into a true 38 percent increase.
And don’t forget brand-new research from University of Chicago’s Bruce Meyer and Notre Dame’s James Sullivan who find that “median income and consumption both rose by more than 50 percent in real terms between 1980 and 2009.”
CLAIM: Elizabeth Warren not only helped to create the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under Obama but has continually claimed she is about protecting consumers. She’s actually made quite a name for herself in this area.
FACT: Professor Warren consulted with an insurance company to suppress asbestos claims, hardly a trait of someone who claims to protect consumers. From The Washington Beacon:
Democratic Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren publicly supports a consumer protection platform, but records show she received more than $100,000 to help suppress personal injury lawsuits against an insurance company accused of misleading the public about the dangers of asbestos.
Warren wrote in a Supreme Court brief on behalf of Travelers that the asbestos victims’ lawsuits were part of a “global strategy developed by the asbestos plaintiffs’ bar.” Warren also criticized the victims’ “enterprising” lawyers. According to Warren:
After a full, contested evidentiary hearing, the bankruptcy court concluded that all of the pending direct action suits against Petitioners violated the 1986 confirmation order, finding as a matter of fact that these new claims were part of a global strategy developed by the asbestos plaintiffs’ bar to put Petitioners ‘in Manville’s chair’ and thereby collect on claims that had already been channeled to the Manville trust. …
And by effectively rewriting a long-final confirmation order (at precisely the time when its enforcement was necessary), the court of appeals gave enterprising plaintiffs’ lawyers an “end run” around a final federal court judgment.
Warren referred in her brief to the court’s responsibility to end “the asbestos litigation crisis.”
Continue Reading more… http://www.examiner.com/article/can-voters-believe-anything-elizabeth-warren-claims-part-ii
Granite State Independent 