Obama Exaggerates Expert Consensus

President Obama claims broad expert agreement with his economic and global warming plans.

Unfortunately, it's untrue. First, let's look at Obama's stimulus plan:

From the Cato Institute's Fiscal Reality Center:

President Obama says that "economists from across the political spectrum agree" on the need for massive government spending to stimulate the economy.

In fact, hundreds of leading economists disagree including Nobel laureates and other prominent scholars. They have all signed the statement that appears in the Cato Institute's ad in the New York Times and in other national publications.

With regard to the need to spend massively to stop global warming, Obama has appointed only true believers to his science, environment, and energy committees. Yet hundreds of leading climate scientists dissent from the so-called consensus. Indeed, the International Conference of Climate Change to be held this March "calls attention to new research that contradicts claims that the moderate warming during the 20th century was primarily man-made and is a crisis." Speakers will include dozens of eminent scientists including Richard Lindzen .the Alfred P Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT, Willie Soon, physicist at the Solar and Stellar Physics Division of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and Lord Christopher Monckton, chief policy advisor to Britain's Science and Public Policy Institute and former advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Sure, "economists (and scientists) from across the political spectrum" support Obama's policies but Obama carefully avoids saying whether it's 1 or 1,000 right-of-center experts. Could Obama be taking word-parsing lessons from Bill Clinton? Is IS Is.