Do you ever hear politicians say particular things on the news that peeve you so much that you yell at the TV or…

Do you ever hear politicians say particular things on the news that peeve you so much that you yell at the TV or radio? For me, they’re usually lines that are factually just plain false, but sound good, I’m sure, to the majority of people who don’t know the facts.

Here are just two I’ve heard today—no attribution because they’re both lines I’ve heard repeated again and again by different politicians and pundits:

• If you’re that worried about your carbon footprint, you should stop breathing (or other statements mentioning human exhalation as a source of carbon)

Yes, we all know from middle-school science class that we breathe in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. But that’s totally unrelated to the carbon emissions we’re worried about as a pollutant. When fossil fuels are burned, carbon that has been locked up (“sequestered”) underground for millions of years is released back into the atmosphere all at once, promoting increases in the total level of atmospheric carbon, in turn contributing to greenhouse effects resulting in overall climate change.

But when we breathe, we’re using the oxygen we inhale to “burn” the carbon-based nutrients from things we eat—mostly carbohydrates from plants—to provide us with energy, and exhaling carbon dioxide. But that carbon dioxide was already in the atmosphere very recently, just until those plants we ate used it in photosynthesis to sequester carbon and release oxygen into the atmosphere. That’s why it’s a “carbon cycle”—animals (including humans) take in oxygen and release CO₂, plants take in CO₂ and release oxygen. No net effect, so no need to stop breathing, thank you very much. (At a gross level, changes to the world population of animals, whether humans or quite notably cattle, can contribute to a net effect, but that’s a completely different issue.)

• If we keep this up, we [the government] are going to spend ourselves into bankruptcy (or other statements saying US government spending will lead to “bankruptcy” or “insolvency”)

This is just one of the many, many fallacious economic lines that rest on incorrectly equating the US economy to the finances of a family or small business. (See also the way debt and deficits are framed, the idea that in hard times the government has to “tighten its belt”, and so many more.)

If you believed the line: how, exactly, would that work? Imagine the government, instead of building one road or school, builds two, or four, or four thousand, “spending too much money” to pay for the workers and materials. Some number in some account somewhere goes negative, so we’re “bankrupt”. And then what happens? The Chinese foreclose? Debt collectors pester the President at all hours? Somebody (who?) swoops down and auctions off the US Capitol building to pay off the debt?

At least since we left the gold standard, the scenario of running out of money by spending it just isn’t possible. Can the government spend so much that bad things happen to the real economy? Surely, and it has happened at times. Can local and state governments “go bankrupt”, in our traditional understanding of the term? Certainly, and they do even as we speak.

But the federal government can’t “spend” its way to “bankruptcy”, and politicians who say that are willfully misleading people who don’t understand macroeconomics and how fiat money or sovereign government spending works. That, or the politicians themselves are totally ignorant of the fundamentals (which is sadly plausible too).