Rinse and Repeat

Need to sell more shampoo? Add the instructions "Shampoo, Rinse and Repeat" to the label. In spite of the fact that these actions to not make your hair any cleaner, a certain portion of consumers read and follow directions.

And the result is, you sell more shampoo.

In Government, if you want to make a case for a position or promote passage of a new law, the strategy is eerily similar. Make up a number and repeat as required.

Don't believe me?

How many illegal aliens are in the country? If you answered 12 million, you're right.

And you're wrong.

You're able to quote the number that the media and Government keeps repeating. In fact, no one actually knows how many illegal aliens are in the country. Not the governement. Not the media. Not me. Not you.

They're illegal, remember? It means that they've crossed the border without documentation. Unnoticed, uncounted.

Yet somehow, we know how many there are. Because the number is quoted and repeated, over and over, by politicians, by media "talking heads" - without any scrutiny of the number's origin. Repeating it makes it "fact". Once it becomes a "fact", then you can justify building a huge 2000 mile (or 720 mile, or 15 mile - how long is it supposed to be?) fence across the border with Mexico. Or you can use the fact to villify all hispanics, both legal and illegal.

Rising crime. Blame it on the "illegals". There are 12 million of them, don't you know. Long wait in the Emergency room? You're waiting behind 12,000,000 "illegals".

Making up numbers isn't the sole pervue of the United States.

In Canada, the RCMP, in an effort to draw attention to software piracy estimated the cost to the country at $30 Billion dollars. They now admit the number was made up.

I finally understand why my 7th grade English teacher was so insistent about essay footnotes.

It's time we learned that before we can begin to solve a problem we need to understand the problem. We need actual facts. And we need to hold those "number quoters" accountable for their accuracy.