Carly Fiorina just likes to pull numbers and stories and whatever smoke she can blow out of the air and throw it at her audience. I could have pulled six or seven different clipettes of her tonight just pulling words out of her ass and blowing them all over the debate, but this one jumped out at me as a prime example of the kinds of things she says with a perfectly straight face.
"There are 73,000 pages in the tax code," Carly declared with absolute certainty.
Except there aren't. Not even close. This version of the current tax code, current as of 2015, has 4,968 pages. If you'd like to include the regulations, you could possibly inflate the total number of pages by another 12,000.
But there's no configuration of the tax code beyond some obscure publication that might print the whole thing in 72 point splendor, that nets out to 73,000 pages.
Carly gets an F for Fib on that one. Line it up right next to her Planned Parenthood nonsense.
In other news, Carly lied about lots of things besides the number of pages in the tax code. For example, she claimed that 92 percent of the jobs lost in the recession were women's jobs. Anyone remember all the whining about how more men lost their jobs? At any rate, this is yet another widely debunked CarlyLie™ which was repeated along with the VERY LARGE TAX CODE that doesn't exist anywhere in this country.
In an October 26 Wall Street Journal op-ed riddled with misleading, outdated, and debunked claims, Carly Fiorina suggested that Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton and President Obama were responsible for the economic distress of millions of women during Obama's first term in office:
While Mrs. Clinton touts her gender to bolster her campaign, 92% of the jobs lost during Mr. Obama's first term -- when Mrs. Clinton was secretary of state -- belonged to women, according to the BLS. The National Women's Law Center reports that the poverty rate among women is 16.1% -- the highest level in 20 years -- and the extreme poverty rate among women the highest ever recorded.
On the October 28 edition of Fox News' The Real Story, Fox News White House correspondent Ed Henry cited Fiorina's op-ed as an example of legitimate "Republican pushback on the claim that the economy does better under Democrats," ignoring that the op-ed is replete with glaring factual errors. The specific job-loss claim was widely debunked when then-Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney first forwarded it in April 2012. PolitiFact rated his claim as "mostly false." The Washington Post's FactChecker labeled the claim "True but False" noting that it was based on cherry-picked data, and as The Post's Wonkblog correctly pointed out, "[t]he reality is that the recession has been easier on women than men." Even the right-wing Daily Caller called out the Romney campaign for its misleading claim.
