By Troy Stouffer

Each and every time you turn on the local, network, or cable news the “experts” are pontificating over their particular area of expertise. They make predictions about everything under the sun from global warming and the current political campaigns, to the economy and the stock market. The amusing aspect of this nightly “expert” analysis is that a few months or years down the road, the experts are all shocked at the outcome. The shocking aspect is that the same news producers continue to trot out the same shocked experts to provide the “expert” analysis on the topic of the day.

Let’s start with the economy and the so-called experts that are all over the news analyzing the current economic health of our country. It does not matter what they predict, in 3 months when the quarterly reports come out, they will inevitably be shocked at the results. They are either much higher or lower than the “experts” predicted and they are left to explain why their predictions were wrong. All the while, they pompously tell us why they are the experts and how even though they were wrong, they were actually right.

We have presidential candidates that are running on the “2 Americas” theory. They believe that there is the America for the rich, which by the way all of the candidates are part of, and the America for the rest of us poor slobs. They cite numbers about the poverty rates in the U.S. and how they will change the lives of the masses. One question I have is that we have had the “War on Poverty” since 1964 when President Lyndon Johnson enacted several programs meant to end poverty in the United States. How is it that we have fought this “war” for 43 years and we still have “2 Americas”? The experts in the campaign tell us that we need more reform to end the poverty. Reform in political speak is more bloated government programs and much higher taxes for all of us, not just those in the “rich” America. By the way, the economic experts would actually be right for once if the proposals were ever implemented.

The experts also love to try to be prophetic with the weather. I am not talking about your local weatherman; there are plenty of jokes about weatherman and their forecasts. I am speaking of the experts predicting the hurricane seasons. How many experts did we hear tell us that 2005 would be as bad as it was? How about 2006? 2006 was predicted to be just as bad as the year before, but we ended up with just a few named storms with no storm making landfall in the United States. Now we have heard that the initial predictions for 2007 were too high and the experts have lowered their numbers. You can be sure that come next hurricane season the same experts will be on TV warning us of the doom to come.

I am not a global warming advocate nor am I a scientist; I freely admit that I am just a regular guy with an opinion. The global warming scientists have been warning us for the past 25 years about how the end is near and the point of no return is rapidly approaching. What I don’t understand is that we can’t predict what the weather will be like tomorrow or next month or even how many hurricanes we will see, but yet the experts tell us that we will see the ice caps melt within our lifetime. Like I said above, I am no expert and am very cynical on global warming, but when you have experts blaming global warming for the bridge collapse in Minnesota last week, or for even the mine collapse in Utah this week, how can anyone take them seriously?

In the political world the experts repeatedly use polls to tell us what is going to happen in even the smallest of elections. How many times over the past few decades have they been shocked at the outcome? I can hear the furious typing already, Bush stole the election! Voter fraud! Disenfranchisement! Hanging chads! Please get over it already. For all of your screaming, Bush is still in the White House and will be until January of 2009.

I believe that these experts are glory hounds that thrive on the face time on TV. They live to hear their sound byte on the news or see their pompous smiling face on TV. The producers of these “news” shows put them on for a variety of reasons, except of course for their accuracy. The next time you see an “expert” holding court, remember what they say and predict, because you will see how buffoonish they are when their predictions all fall flat.

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