Sanders' press release said:

> Tuition at 4-year public colleges and universities rose by 50 percent in the United States during the past decade. As state governments have cut support for higher education, the burden has shifted to students and their parents.

This would normally be read as saying government spending has reduced in general, as otherwise why would the burden shift to students and parents? It's fair to characterize Sanders' statement this way, as you'd have to read it extremely adversarially to conclude that government spending had gone up rather than down.

It literally says state spending. Federal and state funding don't have the same effects on costs, and they don't go to the same things or the same people. If you check out the graphs in the articles below you'll see without much effort that the money the federal government gives out for college education doesn't make college cheaper for normal students.

https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-briefs/20...

It would have been awesome if they provided a source other than just a link back to one of their own BS articles.

> From fiscal years 2003 through 2012, state funding for all public colleges decreased, while tuition rose. Specifically, state funding decreased by 12 percent overall while median tuition rose 55 percent across all public colleges. The decline in state funding for public colleges may have been due in part to the impact of the recent recession on state budgets. Colleges began receiving less of their total funding from states and increasingly relied on tuition revenue during this period. Tuition revenue for public colleges increased from 17 percent to 25 percent, surpassing state funding by fiscal year 2012, as shown below. Correspondingly, average net tuition, which is the estimated tuition after grant aid is deducted, also increased by 19 percent during this period. *These increases have contributed to the decline in college affordability as students and their families are bearing the cost of college as a larger portion of their total family budgets.*

https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-15-151?hl=en-US

So using the statistic "overall government funding increased" to debunk the fully accurate finding that decreased state funding resulted in higher out of pocket costs for actual students is the most insidious and corrosive type of lie we have. Because the fact itself is technically true and if you let the reader use their "common sense" to reach a natural conclusion, you can lie without saying the words. And it takes 1 sentence to say the lie and 3 paragraphs and 2 original sources to dispel. It also has the positive byproduct of making the deceived feel very clever. All in all, it's a libertarian think tank wet dream.