PolitiFlub: No credit or blame for Bill Clinton?

Rookie mistake?

Close on the heels of a hard-to-explain discrepancy involving call-and-response claims from the Obama and Romney campaigns, PolitiFact New Jersey sheds one of PolitiFact's principles like newly adult cicadas shed old exoskeletons .

Recall PolitiFact editor Bill Adair's edict that the fact checkers would start taking credit and blame consistently into account:

About a year ago, we realized we were ducking the underlying point of blame or credit, which was the crucial message. So we began rating those types of claims as compound statements.

Now watch PolitiFact New Jersey duck blame or credit as Bill Clinton claims credit for balancing the budget and partially paying down the national debt:

Our ruling

At a June 1 campaign event, Clinton touted his fiscal record in the final years of his presidency. "Then I gave you four surplus budgets for the first time in more than 70 years, paid $600 billion down on the national debt," Clinton told the crowd.

Clinton delivered four consecutive surplus budgets for the first time in more than seven decades, but the former president misstated the level of debt reduction. During those four fiscal years, the debt held by the public dropped by nearly $453 billion, but total debt jumped by about $400 billion.

We rate the statement Mostly True.

Who says the executive branch doesn't control the purse strings of the federal government?

Piquing PolitiFact: Ranting at PolitiFact New Jersey

Ever notice that PolitiFact finds it impossible to detect and expose various iterations of the Buffett Fallacy?

PolitiFact New Jersey stuck with the pattern while checking a claim by Rep. Steve Rothman (D-N.J.) that people making over $1 million/"these richest people in America" pay their taxes at the lowest rate in 80 years.

Take it away, me:

This fact check perpetuates PolitiFact's failure to fully report the story on income taxes.

Marginal tax rates certainly don't tell the whole story, as they kick in and apply only to income exceeding that taxed at the next lowest rate. Yet the story focuses primarily on the top marginal rate.

Then the story achieves a cockeyed sort of balance by talking about the effective tax rate--but only the effective tax rate for personal income taxes. The CBO estimated effective income tax rates a few years ago. For some reason PolitiFact is allergic to accurately reporting the results of that study.

Admittedly, it's very hard to find. One has to know how to use Google and how to type in "CBO" and "effective tax rates." Don't bother trying it unless your I.Q. is at least 160. You're bound to fail.

http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/ftpdocs/98xx/doc9884/12-23-effectivetaxrates_letter.pdf

As anyone who can read a table can see, the CBO numbers for effective federal tax rates (which includes estimates for corporate taxation) do not support Rothman's claim. He's cherry-picking his data, in effect.

Explain to me why no PolitiFact franchise appears to have the ability to share this information with readers? PolitiFact is a disgrace.

NJ.com.

It's truly mind-boggling that not one (so far as I can tell) of PolitiFact's franchises from National to Rhode Island has reported on the CBO's study of effective tax rates to put the progressive nature of the tax system in context.

Grading PolitiFact (New Jersey): Burying Michael Doherty's underlying point

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)

The fact checkers:

Bill Wichert:  writer, researcher
Caryn Shinske:  editor

Analysis:

PolitiFact appears to have the goods on Doherty.  It sure seems like he got the numbers wrong:

Doherty referred us to a fact sheet prepared by the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Inc., showing that 7,021 prenatal clients were served nationwide in 2009. Based on that figure, Doherty determined there were, on average, about 140 prenatal patients per state.

Here’s the problem: the fact sheet said "clients," but Doherty referred to "visits" on the Senate floor.

Oops.  Big mistake.  One client might have more than one visit.

PolitiFact:

When we checked with Michele Jaker, executive director of Planned Parenthood Affiliates of New Jersey, she said Planned Parenthood centers provided a total of 40,489 prenatal visits across the country in 2009, which is the latest data available.

That's 5.77 visits per client, for those who like to see the numbers crunched.  And Doherty ends up underestimating the correct number by a walloping 83 percent.  What can save Doherty from receiving a "Truth-O-Meter" grade of "False" or worse?

The underlying point, maybe?  PolitiFact editor Bill Adair does call the underlying point the most important thing about a numbers claim, after all.  And there's some good news for Doherty in this fact check.  He's pretty much on target with the underlying point:

But for his overall argument that Planned Parenthood sees few prenatal patients, Doherty is right.

According to the same fact sheet, "other women’s health services," which includes prenatal care, only accounted for 10 percent of all services provided by Planned Parenthood nationwide in 2009.

According to figures provided by Jaker, prenatal clients represented about 0.6 percent of the 91,617 patients served by New Jersey centers in 2009.

In the context of overall services provided by Planned Parenthood, in fact, Doherty's error would shrink to a negligible level.  And since "the biggest factor" in grading a numbers claim is the underlying point, Doherty should fare okay.

Eh.  Not so much, as it turns out.

PolitiFact:

The senator said Planned Parenthood doesn’t provide many prenatal visits, saying the figure was "about 140 visits for each state in the entire country." That figure is way off, because Doherty was using the number of clients. The actual number would be more like 800 visits per state.

Figures provided by Planned Parenthood confirm that prenatal care represents a small part of the services offered, but since the senator’s figures were inaccurate to such a large degree, we rate the statement False.

Depending on the subject and/or the PolitiFact team doing the evaluation, the underlying point isn't always the most important thing.  Sometimes the underlying point doesn't appear to matter at all to the Truth-O-Meter's mighty objective needle.

Fancy that.

The grades:

Bill Wichert:  F
Caryn Shinske:  F

PolitiFact needs to decide as an organization what role the underlying point plays in a fact check.  And then stick to it.