 I'm not a fraud. I'm not a criminal who defrauded the entire country and made up this fictional character and ran for Congress. I've been around a long time. That's newly elected New York Congressman George Santos apologizing after getting caught lying about where he went to high school and whether he graduated from college and where he worked after not graduating from college and whether he's Brazilian or Jewish and whether his grandparents actually fled the Holocaust and whether his mother died on 9 11. Santos is an extreme case but resume padding is nothing new in Washington. Who can forget Senator Elizabeth Warren's fraudulent and ultimately apologize for claims to Native American heritage. I am not a person of color. I am not a citizen of a tribe. She apparently even plagiarized the Cherokee recipes she contributed to the 1984 cookbook called Pow Wow Chow. There's folks like Senator Dick Blumenthal of Connecticut who lied about serving in Vietnam during a tight race but well you know really didn't do anything wrong right. I may have misspoken. I did misspeak on a few occasions. And of course there's President Biden who dropped out of his 1988 presidential bid after getting caught lying about his undistinguished academic record. Graduated with three degrees from undergraduate school and 165 credits only the 123 credits. Biden now concedes he did not graduate in the top half of his law school class that he does not have three degrees from college and that he was not named outstanding political science student. Incredibly he even plagiarized the life story of a British politician whose families were coal miners. Hell I might be president now if it weren't for the fact I said my I had an uncle who was a coal miner turned out I know anybody in the coal mines you know I mean really I tried that crap you know. When politicians invent accomplishments and lie about their past it reflects poorly on their character and it shows a willingness to cheat in the pursuit of power. But the most harmful falsehoods that politicians tell aren't about the scholarships they didn't win the wars they didn't fight or the discrimination they didn't overcome. They're about the laws they pass. Consider last summer stupendously misnamed Inflation Reduction Act which the president announced would shrink the budget deficit and reduce rising prices. This bill this bill will reduce inflationary pressures on the economy. This bill will in fact reduce inflationary pressure on the economy. Even outlets sympathetic to Biden weren't buying that. What the bill actually does is create a vast number of tax breaks and incentives aimed at greening the economy. It raises taxes enough to reduce the deficit by around 300 billion which is just 2% of planned borrowing over the next 10 years. It does nothing to reduce our 30 trillion dollars in debt. Who's loaning the U.S. government those funds the federal reserve mostly which pays for all those treasury bonds by printing money out of thin air. The principal cause of inflation. When he took office the 10-year deficit was expected to be 12.2 trillion dollars. By the end of his first year it had climbed to a projected 14.5 trillion. He's also misrepresented his record on job creation tweeting in September that right now I have the strongest record on growing manufacturing jobs in modern history. As the Washington Post Glenn Kessler pointed out Richard Nixon beats Biden handily on that count with 1.3 million new manufacturing jobs back in the early 70s when the country was a lot smaller to Biden's 630,000. Biden also promised that he would end his predecessors use of title 42 rules to keep migrants from Latin America from entering the country while seeking asylum here. His flip-flop on that has alienated even his most ardent supporters. Of course Joe Biden hardly invented political line especially among presidents. Indeed his predecessors in the Oval Office lied about everything everywhere all at once, healthcare policy, pretexts for war and sex. I did not have sexual relations with that woman Ms. Lewinsky. From newly minted congressmen like George Santos to the president we've come to expect and maybe even accept that our politicians are going to lie about their resumes and their personal lives. That is totally unacceptable but it's the lies about their policies that we really end up paying for and that we really can't afford.