Monday, August 29, 2011

Gasp! He just said "triple D"! Did Mitt Romney just call Obama a boob?

I think so! 

Check out Romney's reference to the triple D president and compare.

Candidates, for better or worse, usually plan the things they say.  It's about even money the Romney folks realized the double meaning in Romney's "triple D" designation of President Obama.  The only thing missing in the comparison is some indication that Romney's audience picked up on the joke.  Too bad we can't see their faces.

Fearing those Krazy Kristians

I gave some serious thought to writing up a treatment of New York Times editor Bill Keller's clueless religion questionnaire.  Thankfully, Ed Morrissey of Hot Air preempted my effort by handling the issue adroitly.

I am among those familiar with the term "Dominionism" from well before the current election cycle, but it wasn't through my extensive reading of Francis Schaeffer's works.  Rather, it came from other readings in the realm of Christian apologetics such as those published in the Christian Research Journal.

Reporters are great--Politico edition

Does Politico's Maggie Haberman know the legal definition of "assault"?

Though it's hard to say for sure, her story on Newt Gingrich's comments on glitter-bombing leaves the answer in doubt.  Haberman writes under the headline "Gingrich: Glittering me was 'an assault'" and contrasts Gingrich's "staid" reaction to his own experience with a glitter bomb to recent comments quoted in the New York Times:
“Glitter bombing is clearly an assault and should be treated as such,” he said in an e-mail. “When someone reaches into a bag and throws something on you, how do you know if it is acid or something that stains permanently or something that can blind you? People have every right to their beliefs but no right to assault others.”

The Times' story does a passable job of examining the legal risks of glitter bombing.

Haberman does not.
Generally, the essential elements of assault consist of an act intended to cause an apprehension of harmful or offensive contact that causes apprehension of such contact in the victim.

The act required for an assault must be overt. Although words alone are insufficient, they might create an assault when coupled with some action that indicates the ability to carry out the threat. A mere threat to harm is not an assault; however, a threat combined with a raised fist might be sufficient if it causes a reasonable apprehension of harm in the victim.

Intent is an essential element of assault. In tort law, it can be specific intent—if the assailant intends to cause the apprehension of harmful or offensive contact in the victim—or general intent—if he or she intends to do the act that causes such apprehension. In addition, the intent element is satisfied if it is substantially certain, to a reasonable person, that the act will cause the result. A defendant who holds a gun to a victim's head possesses the requisite intent, since it is substantially certain that this act will produce an apprehension in the victim. In all cases, intent to kill or harm is irrelevant.
Free Dictionary.com legal dictionary
Haberman's story could easily foment the impression that Gingrich is belatedly overreacting rather than presenting a reasonable legal view of glitter bombing.

Is that impression the planned result of intentional omission or does Haberman not know the legal definition of "assault"?

Suggestions for a third option welcome.

Monday, August 22, 2011

Grading PolitiFact: Warren Buffett and taxes on the "super-rich" (Updated)

TRUE – The statement is accurate and there’s nothing significant missing.
--Principles of PolitiFact and the Truth-O-Meter


The issue:

(clipped from PolitiFact.com)


The fact checkers:

Angie Drobnic Holan:  writer, researcher
Martha Hamilton:  editor


Analysis:

A tale of devilish deception, spun by left-leaning non-partisan Pulitzer Prize-winning PolitiFact:
It's not often you see someone stand up and say, "Tax me more!"

Yet that's just what famed investor Warren Buffett has done in an op-ed in the New York Times headlined, "Stop Coddling the Super-Rich." Buffett says that very wealthy people like himself pay lower tax rates than the middle class, thanks to special tax categories for investment income.
Let's pause to note that "special tax categories for investment income" are not special tax categories for very wealthy people.  Anyone can receive investment income.  An unemployed person can receive investment income.  It just happens wealthier persons are more likely than their peers to draw a high percentage of income from investments.  For that reason, we are not talking about a different statutory tax rate for rich people in this instance.  We are talking about an effective tax rate.  That is, the rate that a given group of persons pays in taxes, usually figured for evaluation of a tax system as the tax percentage of income.  The Congressional Budget Office routinely calculates effective federal tax rates.  Here's how the CBO briefly explains it:
This Congressional Budget Office (CBO) study examines effective federal tax rates—tax liabilities measured as a percentage of income—over the 1979-1997 period for all households and for quintiles, or fifths, of the income distribution.
For purposes of illustration, suppose we have a worker who earned $15,000 over the course of a year.  After deductions, the worker has $1,000 of taxable income, and that falls for purposes of our illustration into a 10 percent tax bracket.  The worker would owe $100 in taxes, and that tax payment would  represent an effective tax rate of  0.67 percent (100/15,000).   Alternatively, one might use adjusted gross income as the denominator in the equation.  In that event the effective tax rate in our example would equal the marginal rate (10 percent).

With that bit of background out of the way, let us continue to follow PolitiFact's twisted tale:
"While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks," he writes.

As an example, Buffett said he paid an effective tax rate of 17.4 percent, while people who worked in his office made much less but paid higher effective tax rates of between 33 percent and 41 percent, averaging 36 percent.

"If you make money with money, as some of my super-rich friends do, your percentage may be a bit lower than mine. But if you earn money from a job, your percentage will surely exceed mine — most likely by a lot," Buffett wrote. "To understand why, you need to examine the sources of government revenue. Last year about 80 percent of these revenues came from personal income taxes and payroll taxes. The mega-rich pay income taxes at a rate of 15 percent on most of their earnings but pay practically nothing in payroll taxes. It’s a different story for the middle class: typically, they fall into the 15 percent and 25 percent income tax brackets, and then are hit with heavy payroll taxes to boot."
In the context of the above explanation of effective tax rates, it should be instantly obvious that Buffett is talking about effective (federal) income tax rates on adjusted gross income.  In Buffett's version of events, the progressive system of tax credits and deductions does not exist.  Neither counts against the type of effective tax rate he measures with his informal workplace survey.  Misleading?  Yeah.

PolitiFact:
(W)e decided to fact-check Buffett's statement that "the mega-rich pay income taxes at a rate of 15 percent on most of their earnings but pay practically nothing in payroll taxes. ... (The middle class) fall into the 15 percent and 25 percent income tax brackets, and then are hit with heavy payroll taxes to boot."
The PolitiFact team selects a very narrow understanding of Buffett's statement.  Buffett sends his readers the message that the "mega-rich" pay a lower effective tax rate than does the middle class.  Buffett accomplishes that aim by ignoring CBO data showing that the mega-rich, in fact, pay a considerably higher effective federal tax rate with corporate taxes figured in.

CBO (bold emphasis added):
The overall federal tax system is progressive—that is, effective tax rates generally rise with income. Households in the bottom fifth of the income distribution paid 4.3 percent of their income in federal taxes, while the middle quintile paid 14.2 percent, and the highest quintile paid 25.8 percent. Average rates continued to rise within the top quintile, with the top percentile facing an effective rate of 31.2 percent.
Claiming that the middle class pays a lower effective tax rate than the "mega-rich" in the terms Buffett and PolitiFact use leaves out approximately half the story.

Writer Angie Drobnic Holan next spends some time explaining how income tax brackets apply in practice, albeit with a noticeable slant toward Buffett's method of calculating effective tax rates on adjusted gross income.  Drobnic Holan states, for example, "the income between $0 and $17,000 is taxed at 10 percent" when she's actually saying the taxable income between $0 and $17,000 is taxed at a 10 percent marginal rate

We get to the meat of the issue in the next section on investment income.

PolitiFact:
The tax rates on investments tend to be lower than taxes on regular income. If you make money buying and selling stocks or receiving dividends from stock ownership, those earnings are generally taxed at 15 percent, the rate for long-term capital gains and qualified dividends.
(...)

Defenders say the lower tax rate helps the economy because it rewards investors for risk-taking and entrepreneurship. They also argue that taxing dividends amounts to double taxation because corporations pay taxes on their income before investors are paid dividends. We won't settle the argument here, but there's no doubt that investors get lower tax rates on their income than workers.
Drobnic Holan's final sentence in the second paragraph is startling.

Think about it.  If it is true that the tax system creates double taxation on investment income then it places in doubt the proposition that investors get lower tax rates on their income than workers.  And, as a matter of fact, the CBO has published data making the point obvious.  In effect, Drobnic Holan writes Buffett a free pass on the very significant missing context we witnessed from readily available CBO reports.

The CBO's middle quintile paid 14.2 percent.  Buffett's middle-class sample supposedly paid an "average of 36 percent."  To the uneducated layman that disparity might appear suspicious.  To PolitiFact it represents just another Buffett half-truth fit to be ignored.

PolitiFact:
Getting back to Buffett's op-ed, his claims rest on how these taxes interact with each other. The fact we're checking here is that "the mega-rich pay income taxes at a rate of 15 percent on most of their earnings but pay practically nothing in payroll taxes," while middle class taxpayers "fall into the 15 percent and 25 percent income tax brackets, and then are hit with heavy payroll taxes to boot."

He's right that a billionaire whose income is mostly from investments is probably taxed at a lower rate than someone who has an ordinary job. Very little of this taxpayer's income is wage income, so payroll taxes don't take much of a bite. It seems likely that much of this hypothetical person's income would be taxed around the 15 percent rate. And, in fact, as Buffett says, statistics from the Internal Revenue Service show that the 400 wealthiest taxpayers pay tax rates of less than 20 percent.
The wealthiest 400 taxpayers do pay a slightly lower effective tax rate than others who occupy the highest quintile of earners, and by ignoring the issue of double taxation along with other complexities of the tax system PolitiFact can read Buffett's statement as perfectly true.  But the "mega-rich" pay a much higher effective federal tax rate than those in the middle quintile.  Buffett's claims leave the opposite impression.  PolitiFact leaves that false impression intact.

PolitiFact:
On the other side of the equation, people who work for a living, especially those who make higher than average salaries, get taxed at higher rates. It gets a little complicated, given how the tax brackets work, but basically, people who make between $100,000 and $200,000 are paying around 20 percent in income taxes, and it goes up from there, according to an analysis from the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.
PolitiFact pulls a fast one with the above paragraph, which follows on the heels of the one quoted above  concluding that much of higher earners' income is taxed at a 15 percent rate.  Drobnic Holan's story encourages the reader to compare the 20 percent figure above with the 15 percent figure in her preceding paragraph.  But the table she links at the Tax Policy Center actually follows the pattern we saw in the CBO's report on effective tax rates:


The top row shows earnings at the modest end of the scale.  The bottom row shows the highest earners.  Note that the federal tax rates (second column) simply increase for the higher wage groups.  The Tax Policy Center chart has the highest earners paying a 29.1 percent rate ("Average Federal Tax Rate"), not something in the neighborhood of 15 percent.  Drobnic Holan buries the contrast in the brief phrase "it goes up from there."

The problem stems from Buffett's ambiguity.  Buffett writes of the "mega-rich" but does not define the group except to say that they make the bulk of their income from investments.  Drobnic Holan steps in to cover for Buffett with examples using the top 400 earners, with those examples apparently based on income tax rates rather than effective overall federal taxation, and quite possibly excluding consideration of income taxed at 0 percent.

The unsuspecting reader gets only part of the story from Buffett and Drobnic Holan.

Economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez help underscore the importance of the full picture:
(I)nternational comparisons confirm that is it (sic) critical to take into account other taxes than the individual income tax to assess properly the extent of overall tax progressivity, both for time trends and for cross-country comparisons.
"How Progressive is the U.S. Federal Tax System? A Historical and International Perspective"
If for time trends and cross-country comparisons then also for the degree of progressivity itself.

PolitiFact's series of concluding statements form a thicket of misinformation and misdirection.
Buffett slightly glosses over the fact that if you're in the 25 percent tax bracket, your overall tax rate is less than 25 percent. And, the more money you make, the more income taxes you pay, while payroll taxes seem less and less significant as a percentage of income.
Buffett entirely glosses over the marginal implementation of the federal tax system, but far worse than that he uses a concept of the federal tax rate that gives his readers a distorted picture.
We're dubious someone would pay as high as a 41 percent tax rate, as Buffett claims someone in his office now pays. (The top income tax rate is 35 percent, but payroll taxes as a share of income decline as income rises, which makes it difficult to get above 37.9 percent, according to the people we ran this by at the Tax Policy Center.) We contacted Buffett's offices as Berkshire Hathaway about this point but didn't hear back.
PolitiFact simply excuses Buffett for the apparent inaccuracy by focusing attention on a different aspect of his claim.  And it's even tougher to get to Buffett's 41 percent figure if one counts non-taxable income (the portion of income taxed at 0 percent) as part of the denominator while figuring the effective tax rate.
One final note: People who don't pay any income tax at all tend to have limited incomes, or they qualify for enough deductions -- think of child tax credits and mortgage interest -- that they have no income. When Buffett talks about people in the middle class who pay more taxes than he does, he's thinking of people who make much higher than average salaries.
Angie Drobnic Holan, Telepath.

Seriously, how does she know what Buffett is thinking?  The story even treats his middle class examples as coming from the middle quintile.  That's average salary territory, as are the 15 and 25 percent marginal income tax rates Buffett mentioned.  And don't forget the CBO had the middle quintile paying a 14.2 percent effective federal tax rate in 2005.  That includes payroll taxes.

click image to enlarge (source:  CBO)

Who pulls the wool over our eyes?  Warren Buffett.  And PolitiFact helps.

More.  Wool.  Pull.  Eyes:
(W)hen it comes to Buffett's statement, there are two categories: the rich and the really rich. And the evidence tends to point to the conclusion that the really rich pay less in taxes as a percentage of income then their merely well-to-do counterparts -- if their income comes primarily from investments. Overall, we rate Buffett's statement True.
Buffett explicitly referenced the middle class for purposes of his comparisons.  I won't try to imagine why Drobnic Holan and PolitiFact engage in this creative spin.

Buffett's statement is accurate for one method of figuring effective tax rates, coincidentally the method that supports the thesis of his op-ed.  Buffett left out a considerable amount of relevant information the omission of which is supposed to lead to "Half True" ratings on the "Truth-O-Meter" if not worse.
HALF TRUE – The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context.

BARELY TRUE – The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression.
Principles of PolitiFact and the Truth-O-Meter
Instead, PolitiFact attaches the rating associated with "The statement is accurate and there’s nothing significant missing."


The grades:

Angie Drobnic Holan:  F
Martha Hamilton:  F

The CBO's standard method of calculating effective tax rates for overall federal taxes and income taxes in particular was missing along with the associated data that put Buffett's thesis in doubt.  The omission is significant enough that the label "journalists reporting badly" applies.


Afters:

Ever since a recent PolitiFact story placed great emphasis on the ideological bias of a Libertarian think tank and how it discredited information from that source, PolitiFact's own use of such expert sources draws greater interest.  PolitiFact's source list ran top-heavy with citations of the center-left and certainly ideologically engaged Tax Policy Center.

The lone exception was this page from the conservative Tax Foundation.

Can you say "token conservative"?

Sure.  I knew you could.  Now review Tim Groseclose's method of evaluating political bias in the media.


Update:  

An Associated Press fact check also contradicts PolitiFact's (per)version of the truth:
This year, households making more than $1 million will pay an average of 29.1 percent of their income in federal taxes, including income taxes, payroll taxes and other taxes, according to the Tax Policy Center, a Washington think tank.

Households making between $50,000 and $75,000 will pay an average of 15 percent of their income in federal taxes.
An insignificant omission in PolitiFact's eyes? 

Hat tip to Hot Air.

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Grading PolitiFact: Raul Labrador and the effect of tax cuts?

To assess the truth for a numbers claim, the biggest factor is the underlying message.
--PolitiFact editor Bill Adair


Shortly after finishing a "Grading PolitiFact" item about Jennifer Granholm and her recent appearance on "Meet the Press," I discovered a related PolitiFact story stemming from the same edition of "Meet the Press."  The contrast between the two fact checks is illuminating.



The issue:

(clipped from PolitiFact.com)
As with the Granholm story, I have encompassed more of the PolitiFact headline/deck material than usual in the clipped image.  Note that PolitiFact does not quote its subject here, which is somewhat unusual.  Note also the paraphrased presentation of Labrador's supposed claim:  "Raul Labrador says tax hike led to spike in Michigan unemployment."  Finally, note the proximity of the "Mostly False" graphic below the paraphrase.


The fact checkers:

Louis Jacobson:  writer, researcher
Martha Hamilton:  editor

This is the same PolitiFact team that produced the Granholm story.


Analysis:

The Granholm and Labrador stories share significant similarities beyond having the same writing/editing team.  Both feature a pair of numbers claims and both feature an underlying argument.  And in both cases the PolitiFact team featured the underlying argument next to the "Truth-O-Meter" graphic.  Granholm's graphic reads "Mostly True."  Labrador's reads "Mostly False."

PolitiFact was a tad stingy with the surrounding context for Labrador's claim, substituting narrative description for the dialog between Granhom and Labrador.  The "Meet the Press" transcript tells the story better:
GOV. GRANHOLM: No, I mean, clearly the entitlement question has to be addressed. But I can tell you, David, I cut more as a percentage out of government than any state in the country this past decade. And where is Michigan in terms of its economic growth? Cutting did not result in economic growth. What results in growth is making sure you've got a good business climate for businesses to grow and prosper. And so we've got to cut where we can in order to invest where we must in order to grow the economy. And it's that investment side that I worry that those who are affiliated with the tea party or who are on the far right don't realize that other countries are co-investing with businesses in order to create jobs in their, in their countries. If we do nothing more than just cut, that will continue to accelerate the lack of growth in GDP. So we've got to realize that the strategy here must be very specific. Yes, you've got to reform entitlements, but you've got reform entitlements and invest in order to grow because the quickest way to take down your deficit is through growth.

REP. LABRADOR: But, David, let's talk about the truth about what happened in Michigan. Governor Granholm actually supported the highest tax increases in the history of Michigan, and unemployment went from...

GOV. GRANHOLM: OK. Wait a second.

REP. LABRADOR: ...6.8 percent to 15.3 percent.

GOV. GRANHOLM: When I took over Michigan...

REP. LABRADOR: And...

GOV. GRANHOLM: Let's not get into an argument about Michigan.

REP. LABRADOR: ...that's a reality, that's a reality.

GOV. GRANHOLM: Michigan has the highest unemployment...

MR. GREGORY: Let him finish his point and then you respond to it.

REP. LABRADOR: And that's a reality. At the same time, you have the governor of Texas who actually supported tax decreases and more broadening of the base, and actually we have the fastest growth in Texas than any of the other states.

GOV. GRANHOLM: So this is a great point because Michigan's economy is emblematic of what's going on in the nation, a global shift in manufacturing jobs. Michigan had seven times more automotive manufacturing than other states in the country, and we saw those jobs leave because of this global shift. So the question for America is what can our nation do to make sure we have advanced manufacturing jobs in our country? Yes, Michigan had a huge concentration of them, and that's--you know, we had the biggest bankruptcies in the, in the world inside of Michigan. So clearly our unemployment rate was attached to that. But for the nation, we have to decide how are we going to be competitive globally?
For good measure, a video of the "Meet the Press" episode:




Equipped with the full context, let's follow the reasoning of the PolitiFact team:
After talking to experts, we decided not to check Labrador’s specific claim that the tax increase under Granholm was the biggest in the state’s history. We made this decision for two reasons -- first, there are many conflicting ways to make such a comparison and second, the data to prove or disprove the claim is difficult to obtain.

Instead, we’ll look at two questions. Did the state’s unemployment rate go from 6.8 percent to 15.3 percent? And did the tax increases under Granholm -- whether or not they were historically large -- contribute to the increase in unemployment?
PolitiFact deems one of Labrador's claims pretty much unverifiable, so for purposes of the fact check we scratch off one of the similarities between the claims of Granholm and Labrador.

PolitiFact found that Labrador's claim of a rise in unemployment to 15.3 percent was incorrect.  Labrador was working from widely published reports, but the data were subsequently revised.  The revised unemployment figure came to 14.1 percent.

PolitiFact:
So while Labrador overstated the peak unemployment rate under Granholm, we’ll give him some leeway because the higher number did receive media attention before the revision was made.
How much leeway?  PolitiFact doesn't say in this section.  But regardless of that, we can use past ratings to get a sense of where PolitiFact might rate Labrador regardless of the granting of leeway.  Labrador's figure represents an exaggeration of about 16.5 percent with respect to the change in Michigan's unemployment rate.  For comparison, Ron Paul received a "Mostly True" rating for a claim based on a figure that was exaggerated by 15 percent where PolitiFact found his underlying argument sound.

If PolitiFact grades consistently with its procedure for the Paul rating then Labrador should not fare worse than "Mostly True" if his underlying point holds up.

The underlying message

PolitiFact:
Did the tax increases under Granholm contribute to the increase in Michigan’s unemployment?

The short answer is that they probably did -- but they were hardly the driving force that Labrador implies.
Hold on. To what degree does Labrador imply that the tax increases were a driving force behind the unemployment figures?

I'll try to make the strongest case for the implication PolitiFact alleges.

1) Labrador plainly presents a correlation between increased taxes and an increased unemployment rate, and often people present such correlations to subtly suggest causation. Note, however, that the implication is not a necessary feature of a stated correlation.

2) A parallel exists between Labrador's remarks and Granholm's prior statement. Granholm explicitly stated her underlying argument ("Cutting did not result in economic growth").  One could argue the parallel supports taking Labrador's response as a reply in kind.

3)  Labrador goes on to draw a contrast between Texas and Michigan.  While Michigan raised taxes and unemployment increased, Texas lowered taxes and added jobs.

4)  Labrador drew the Michigan stats from a set of notes, suggesting that hitting Granholm with the stats was part of a preplanned talking point.  One may infer that talking point was the effect of taxes on the economy.

5)  Perhaps Labrador is well known to advocate the idea that tax increases lead directly to spikes in unemployment (I do not know this to be the case, but if true it would contribute to PolitiFact's interpretation).

That's all I'm able to come up with.

Those five points (or less) might serve for some to conclude that Labrador certainly intended to say that the Granholm-supported tax increase led to a spike in Michigan's unemployment rate.

I argue that every subject of a fact check deserves charitable interpretation.

With Granholm we're pretty well stuck with her underlying message.  She announced it in so many words.

With Labrador, by contrast, we have a supposed implication.  There exists a commonly understood type of implication where we understand the meaning of a statement apart from the logic of the statement.  When a mobster tells a business owner that it would be a shame if the front window of his shop was smashed in the middle of the night, the shop owner is reasonable to understand that as a threat against his property.  But if the speaker is not a mobster, the statement may simply represent the observation that such a loss is unfortunate.

I'm a Republican, so I understand how Republicans think.  So bear with me a moment.

I don't know any Republicans who think that raising taxes will solely explain subsequent effects on unemployment numbers.  I don't.  Doubtless I've seen that opinion expressed here or there on the Internet--if so I don't remember.  But my point is this:  If I'm Rep. Labrador then I point out the tax increase and unemployment numbers in Michigan in order to provide part of the picture Granholm skipped in her version of events.  It doesn't make sense to take poor economic performance as a proof that cutting government spending fails to help job growth, as Granholm did, when the government increases its bite on the economy through taxes at the same time.

The charitable interpretation suits the context very well.  Yet PolitiFact never offers it to Labrador.

I might go along with PolitiFact's interpretation if it carried a slightly better justification than I was able to provide.  But at best it looks like something close to a coin flip in deciding what Labrador was saying.  And when there exists a reasonable chance that something different was meant then the alternate interpretation deserves some discussion, at minimum.

It makes a big difference which underlying point we impute to Labrador, and we need only revisit the previous quotation from the story to make the point (blue highlights added):
Did the tax increases under Granholm contribute to the increase in Michigan’s unemployment?

The short answer is that they probably did -- but they were hardly the driving force that Labrador implies.
If the tax hikes probably increased unemployment then the alternate interpretation of Labrador's words--the charitable one--is also probably correct.

Conclusions

Thankfully we can trust the machine-like precision of the "Truth-O-Meter" to provide us the answer.

PolitiFact:
Even though Labrador ignored the revised numbers, we consider his recap of the arc of Michigan unemployment to be fair. However, while higher taxes may have boosted unemployment on the margins, most of the available evidence suggests that Michigan’s rise in unemployment tracked the course of the national recession, simply to a greater degree, given the weakness of the state’s signature manufacturing sector. The experts we spoke to agreed that the impact of tax policy likely played a relatively minor role in the unemployment spike Labrador was referring to in 2008 and 2009. We rate his statement Mostly False.
Again, we have a "Truth-O-Meter" reading that is simply unbelievable.

If, by "fair" PolitiFact does not count Labrador's statistical error against him, then all of the negative from the "Mostly False" rating comes from the underlying argument uncharitably attributed to Labrador by PolitiFact.

But that's not the worst of it.

Remember we have strong parallels between this fact check of Labrador and the fact check of Granholm.  Both the Democrat and the Republican apparently rate okay for the accuracy of their numbers according to PolitiFact.  That means that the bulk of any difference in the "Truth-O-Meter" rating stems from the underlying argument attributed to each.

Even if we accept the uncharitable version of Labrador's argument, it seems impossible to justify using different Truth-O-Meter ratings for the two political figures.  The language Jacobson chose to describe Granholm's underlying point in the Granholm story closely parallels the unfavorable descriptions of Labrador's supposed underlying point:
However, in the Meet the Press interview, Granholm was trying to use her experience as a governor to make a larger point about how cutting government "did not result in economic growth." She's probably correct that government cuts hampered her state's recovery, at least in the short term, but Michigan’s experience over the last decade suggests that the reverse is an even bigger factor -- that is, poor economic growth hurts tax revenues and, in turn, forces government cuts.
"Jennifer Granholm says massive government cuts in Michigan didn't spur growth"
On the underlying arguments PolitiFact gave Granholm a great deal of credit for a partial truth ("Mostly True") while giving Labrador hardly any credit at all ("Mostly False").  In both cases the subjects supposedly advocated an inference that was "probably correct" but swamped in terms of causation by other factors.  Of the two, Granholm placed greater stress on the underlying point.

Bear in mind the same PolitiFact team produced these two stories in roughly the same time frame.

Jacobson and Hamilton certainly succeeded in one respect.  They produced a poster child for media bias in action.


The grades:

Louis Jacobson:  F
Martha Hamilton:  F

The journalists performed a sensational job of applying journalistic standards unevenly.  The label "journalists reporting badly" applies.


Afters:

Sunday, August 07, 2011

Grading PolitiFact : Jennifer Granholm and the effect of cutting government jobs

To assess the truth for a numbers claim, the biggest factor is the underlying message.
--PolitiFact editor Bill Adair


The issue:

(clipped from PolitiFact.com)

I used a larger clip than usual for this item.  Observe the arrangement.  The quotation of Granholm includes three separate claims.  The first two are statistical (numbers) claims and the third represents a logical inference Granholm sells to the listener.  The last is Granholm's underlying point, which PolitiFact editor Bill Adair says is the most important part of a numbers claim.  The headline material bears that out, because the summary below the quotation ("Jennifer Granholm says massive government cuts in Michigan didn't spur growth") places its full emphasis on the underlying point.  The "Mostly True" graphic lurks nearby, encouraging readers to conclude that cutting government jobs does not spur economic growth.


The fact checkers:

Louis Jacobson:  writer, researcher
Martha Hamilton:  editor


Analysis:

Context first, as presented by PolitiFact:
During the July 31, 2011, edition of NBC’s Meet the Press, Jennifer Granholm -- a Democrat who served as governor of Michigan from 2003 to 2011 -- was asked to bring her own experience to bear on the debate over the federal debt ceiling.

"Clearly the entitlement question has to be addressed," Granholm said, referring to the rising cost of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, which is a major contributor to the growing federal debt.

However, Granholm told host David Gregory that she was skeptical about whether such cuts would be a boon for the economy at large.
Hmmm.  Entitlements.

More context, including the money quote:
"I can tell you, David, I cut more as a percentage out of government than any state in the country this past decade," Granholm said. "And where is Michigan in terms of its economic growth? Cutting did not result in economic growth. What results in growth is making sure you've got a good business climate for businesses to grow and prosper. And so we've got to cut where we can in order to invest where we must in order to grow the economy. And it's that investment side that I worry that those who are affiliated with the tea party or who are on the far right don't realize that other countries are co-investing with businesses in order to create jobs in their countries.

"If we do nothing more than just cut," she continued, "that will continue to accelerate the lack of growth in (gross domestic product). So we've got to realize that the strategy here must be very specific. Yes, you've got to reform entitlements, but you've got reform entitlements and invest in order to grow because the quickest way to take down your deficit is through growth."

Granholm's finish exhibits a fantastic misunderstanding of economics.  Her statement carries the presumption that government spending serves as a better stimulus for economic growth than private investment.  The PolitiFact story focuses on her former statement about the supposed effects of cutting government jobs in Michigan--already somewhat a tangent because she jumped from her topic (entitlement spending) to government jobs.

PolitiFact approaches her statement by dividing it up into three different claims which are each dealt with separately then combined for the final "Truth-O-Meter" rating.  Unless I'm interpreting something incorrectly, PolitiFact is doing what it claims it does not do (bold emphasis added):
PolitiFact writers and editors spend considerable time deliberating on our rulings. We always try to get the original statement in its full context rather than an edited form that appeared in news stories. We then divide the statement into individual claims that we check separately. For example, a Bill Richardson TV ad produced two claims. (We only make Truth-O-Meter rulings on those individual claims. We don't make them in our articles because they often summarize multiple Truth-O-Meter items that had different rulings.)
Is it possible that the separately checked rulings might occur in the same story?  I suppose so, but if we take take the claim that way it is difficult to see how PolitiFact doesn't end up doing in its stories what it tries to avoid in its "articles."  Add to that the fact that stories such as this one do not attempt to apply a "Truth-O-Meter" rating to the individual claims.

So, how about those three claims?

Did Michigan cut more from its government than any state in the country?
PolitiFact says yes.

How poor was Michigan’s economic growth during Granholm’s tenure?
PolitiFact says it was bad enough to count Granholm as accurate.

Did spending cuts to state government hamper Michigan’s economic growth?

PolitiFact:
The cuts to government almost certainly hampered Michigan’s economy. But experts say that they weren’t the primary cause of the state’s poor economic performance.
PolitiFact uses the statements of economics experts to support the latter claim.  PolitiFact provides nothing supporting the former claim.  Doubtless PolitiFact could have found expert commentary supporting that claim coming from the abundance of Keynesian economists.  PolitiFact already settled the long-running dispute among economists, after all.

Isn't it obvious that not having a top-heavy government burden makes a state more attractive for business?

Regardless of the slant in this section, PolitiFact finds Granholm's implied argument very dubious:
(A) more appropriate way of thinking about it is that a poor economy in Michigan caused a drop in state tax revenue, which in turn forced Granholm to cut government services -- not the other way around.
Thus the most important aspect of Granholm's claim, at least if we go by Bill Adair's guidelines, doesn't hold much water at all.

Bad news for Granholm?  Not really:
(I)n the Meet the Press interview, Granholm was trying to use her experience as a governor to make a larger point about how cutting government "did not result in economic growth." She's probably correct that government cuts hampered her state's recovery, at least in the short term, but Michigan’s experience over the last decade suggests that the reverse is an even bigger factor -- that is, poor economic growth hurts tax revenues and, in turn, forces government cuts.

This doesn’t mean that Granholm’s point is inaccurate, but in trying to apply a state lesson to a federal problem, she’s ignored a key factor in how state fiscal policy works. On balance, we rate her statement Mostly True.
That's some balancing act by PolitiFact.

This rating is akin to taking the claim "Our failure to locate 15 four-leaf clovers near the Michigan capitol building led to poor economic performance" and treating it the following way.

The fact checker finds it true that the needed number of four-leaf clovers was not gathered.  And the conclusion of the argument (that the failure to locate the clovers hurts the economy) gets placed in a headline next to a graphic that reads "Mostly True."  Check the clipped material from PolitiFact.com again.


The grades:

Louis Jacobson:  F
Martha Hamilton:  F

Saturday, August 06, 2011

PolitiFlub: the inflation miscalculation

Have I mentioned that journalists and math remain a volatile combination?

Seems like I have.

PolitiFact Oregon gives us yet another example.  I stumbled across this story from 2010 while looking at PolitiFact's history of applying inflation adjustments to dollar figures said to represent a doubling.

It's crazy what you can find in PolitiFact's archives.  Republican Scott Bruun claimed federal government spending doubled between 2000 and 2009.

PolitiFact Oregon stumbled when it ran the numbers:
At first glance, it appears he is right. His campaign cited numbers from the federal Office of Management and Budget that show total federal spending in 2000 was $1.78 trillion. By 2009, spending increased to $3.5 trillion. So that’s about double in unadjusted dollars.

But if you account for inflation, the spending total is $1.78 trillion in 2000 and goes to $2.29 trillion in 2009. That’s only a 29 percent increase.
I wonder what inflation calculator was used?  Apparently not this one:

www.bls.gov

Go ahead.  Visit the URL and try it.  One can also plug in the 2000 baseline and adjust it to 2009 dollars.  It works either way.  But don't adjust 2000 dollars to 2009 dollars and adjust 2009 dollars to 2000 dollars in the same equation.  And in particular do not plug the $1.78 trillion figure into the first box, adjust that year 2000 figure into 2009 dollars and then take that result as the increase in federal spending.


Yet the latter is apparently close to what PolitiFact Oregon did.  It's the type of mistake one might call "bungling" yet it has lasted unmolested in PolitiFact's archives for nearly a year.

Charles Pope of PolitiFact Oregon, you've been noticed.

Bill Adair, you let that error pass?

The percentage increase was about double what PolitiFact Oregon reported.   Fact check that, PolitiFact.

PolitiFlub: Tom Coburn and the PolitiFact corrections game

When we make a mistake, we correct it and note it on the original item. If the mistake is so significant that it requires us to change the ruling, we will do so.
--Principles of PolitiFact and the Truth-O-Meter
Pity poor PolitiFact.  They knoweth not what they do.

PolitiFact tried to make good on its corrections policy this week by updating an item on Tom Coburn (R-Okla.).  Coburn, in the context of drawing attention to the increase of government spending, claimed the government has doubled in size since 2001.

PolitiFact conclusion version one:
Coburn is entirely right about federal outlays doubling over 10 years. And if you use one of two plausible measures, he’s right on the growth since Obama took office. But using another plausible measure, the growth of government under Obama was smaller. On balance, we rate Coburn’s statement Mostly True.
PolitiFact addicts may note that PolitiFact has broken its rule of dividing complex statements into individual claims for purposes of Truth-O-Meter ratings:
PolitiFact writers and editors spend considerable time deliberating on our rulings. We always try to get the original statement in its full context rather than an edited form that appeared in news stories. We then divide the statement into individual claims that we check separately. For example, a Bill Richardson TV ad produced two claims. (We only make Truth-O-Meter rulings on those individual claims. We don't make them in our articles because they often summarize multiple Truth-O-Meter items that had different rulings.)
PolitiFact's principles often seem more like ... guidelines.  They "only" make Truth-O-Meter rulings on the individual claims except when they don't.

But back to Coburn and PolitiFact conclusion version two:
We don’t think that Coburn was entirely wrong to use non-inflation-adjusted dollars, but it would have been better if he -- and we -- had adjusted for inflation. Doing it this way still means there was a significant increase in government over the period he studied, but not as high as he had indicated. On balance, we have decided to lower our ruling from Mostly True to Half True.
It would be pretty easy to accept PolitiFact's revised rating of Coburn if was consistent with PolitiFact's usual practice.  Sure, Coburn was probably using his doubling reference kind of like a "large as a football field" type reference to simply illustrate the growth in terms the average listener could easily grasp.  His point, as PolitiFact appears to note, was simply that the government has grown considerably in the past decade in terms of spending.


Afters