Lie Count - Tracking our future leaders’ lies

Room for subjective, indirect meaning - +0 Lies

From a speech Sarah Palin gave in Colorado Springs:

[Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have] gotten too big and too expensive to taxpayers. The McCain-Palin administration will make them smaller and smarter and more effective for homeowners who need help.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are private enterprises publicly traded on the NYSE. Though chartered by the government, since going fully private decades ago they have held no direct costs to taxpayers.

From Fannie Mae’s website:

In 1968, Fannie Mae was re-chartered by Congress as a shareholder-owned company, funded solely with private capital raised from investors on Wall Street and around the world.

From Freddie Mac’s website:

In fact, Freddie Mac is one of the nation’s largest federal taxpayers. Freddie Mac is owned by its shareholders and, like other corporations, is accountable to its shareholders and a board of directors.

There you have it. About the only thing public here is the setting for Palin’s lie.

Editor’s note: it could be argued that this was a misspeak on her part. If she comes out and corrects it, we will reconsider this as a lie.

Update: It has been pointed out that though Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are private companies, therefore bearing no direct financial costs to taxpayers, Palin’s statement could be a reference to indirect costs. In that sense, you could reasonably infer any private enterprise or citizen is “too expensive to taxpayers”. We’ve removed the point and adjusted the score according.

Tags: Palin

This entry was posted on Monday, September 8th, 2008 at 9:05 pm and is filed under red almost lie. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.