Grading PolitiFact (Virginia): Bob McDonnell and job creation in Texas

Words matter -- We pay close attention to the specific wording of a claim. Is it a precise statement? Does it contain mitigating words or phrases?
--Principles of PolitiFact and the Truth-O-Meter

The issue:

(clipped from PolitiFact.com)

The fact checkers:

Jacob Geiger:  writer, researcher
Warren Fiske:  editor


Analysis:

Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) of Virginia wouldn't mind if his state could emulate the jobs record of Texas.  McDonnell, in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, made a recent statement praising Texas on that point.

"Under Gov. Rick Perry’s leadership [Texas] has created more jobs over the last decade than the rest of the states combined," McDonnell wrote.

And PolitiFact was there:

We wondered if Perry’s record on creating jobs matched McDonnell’s claim.

With the fact check identified, it is research time. PolitiFact contacted McDonnell's office for backing information before launching its own survey:

Our research took us down a road traveled by PolitiFact Texas in examining various claims from Perry that most of the jobs created in the U.S. are in the Lone Star State.

PolitiFact Texas has debunked several of these eye-popping claims, noting that they are based on statistics from a minority of states that have had overall job gains in recent years.

Though PolitiFact Virginia mentions "several" claims debunked by PolitiFact Texas, we have but one represented in the list of references.  PolitiFact Texas debunked Governor Perry to the tune of "Half True" in that case, and that story contained a link to another story featuring a claim similar to the current subject where the claim received a "False" rating.

PolitiFact, you see, pays special attention to the words politicians use.  If they say "we created x jobs" it does not necessarily mean net jobs.  And that's misleading.

Unless you're Rick Perry:

"Gov. Rick Perry says Texas has created more than 850,000 jobs, more than the other states combined" ("True")

Or Joe Biden:

"Vice President Joe Biden says more jobs were created in the last year than in all eight years under George Bush" ("MostlyTrue")

Or Mitt Romney:

"Mitt Romney tells CPAC that Canada created more jobs in January than the U.S. did" ("True")

Or Debbie Wasserman Schultz:

"Debbie Wasserman Schultz says job creation in 2010 on pace to eclipse growth during George W. Bush's entire administration" ("Half True)

You get the idea, after noting that Wasserman Schultz's "Half True" had nothing at all to do with gross job creation as opposed to net job creation.  The fact is that "job creation" is a statistic that we normally take to mean net job creation.  Yet PolitiFact applies an uncharitable interpretation to job creation statements from governors McDonnell and Perry with no apparent justification from the context.

PolitiFact Texas:

Veronica Sanchez Downey, who analyzes data for the commission, said she'd feel comfortable summarizing the commission's conclusion about Texas job gains this way: "Of all the states that gained jobs in the U.S. including the District of Columbia, Texas accounted for" 67.2 percent of the added jobs from November 2007 to November 2008. The 67.2-percent figure reflects adjustments of the data since the initial research.

Perry, of course, didn't say it that way.

Right.  Perry did not mention the term "net" while talking about job gains.  He just talked about job gains, which people tend to understand as net job gains.  That interpretation is so ubiquitous that PolitiFact typically favors it without discussion, as shown by the preceding examples.  So Perry gets "debunked" by making an exception to the normal conventions of English interpretation.

You might get more consistent results using the "Magic 8 Ball" instead of PolitiFact.

Let's get this over with:

Let’s review. 

McDonnell wrote that under Gov. Perry, Texas "has created more jobs over the last decade than the rest of the states combined."

But the Virginia governor used net job numbers. Those are different from job creation figures, which are not compiled by the BLS or other national authority. So using net job numbers and calling them job creation figures is a case of comparing apples to oranges.

We rate McDonnell’s claim Barely True.

It's just too bad for McDonnell that PolitiFact Virginia failed to take note of the several PolitiFact items that treated job creation claims in terms of net jobs, with ratings ranging from as low as "Half True" to as high as "True."

Reply hazy.  Try again.

The grades:

Jacob Geiger:  F
Warren Fiske:  F

Fiske and Geiger had the opportunity to notice PolitiFact's disgraceful inconsistency in its treatment of job creation claims.  The team somehow failed to notice PolitiFact's history of (appropriately) treating job creation claims as dealing with net job creation where the context warrants taking them that way.  The PolitiFact Virginia team instead zeroed in on a handful of bizarre cases where the obvious intent was ignored.

Afters:

What if we were to look at cases where PolitiFact has ruled on jobs claims and where considering the jobs claims in terms of gross jobs rather than net jobs might have affected the ruling?

Grading PolitiFact: Nancy Pelosi and The Great Job Creator

When we find we've made a mistake, we correct the mistake.
--Principles of PolitiFact and the Truth-O-Meter

The issue:

(Clipped from PolitiFact.com)

The fact checkers:

Louis Jacobson: writer, researcher
Martha Hamilton: editor


Analysis:

Back in July of this year I published the observation that PolitiFact uses wildly inconsistent criteria when evaluating job creation claims.  PolitiFact sometimes finds it important to distinguish between job creation and net increases in the number of jobs:

Our research took us down a road traveled by PolitiFact Texas in examining various claims from Perry that most of the jobs created in the U.S. are in the Lone Star State.

PolitiFact Texas has debunked several of these eye-popping claims, noting that they are based on statistics from a minority of states that have had overall job gains in recent years.

I likewise noted how the inconsistency tended to benefit Democrats while harming Republicans.

Is the distinction important to PolitiFact in this case involving Pelosi?

Let's find out, taking it from the top:

During a Sept. 17, 2011, edition of the MSNBC show Up with Chris Hayes, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., offered a defense of the U.S. economy’s job creation record during President Barack Obama’s tenure.

"When President (George W.) Bush was president for those eight years with those tax policies, we lost jobs," Pelosi said. "In fact, more jobs were created in the second year -- that would be last year -- in the private-sector in the Obama administration than in the eight years of the Bush administration. And they want us to repeat those tax cuts at the high end which, again, did not create jobs, but they did deepen the deficit."

Pelosi makes no apparent attempt to distinguish between net job creation and gross job creation, though in fairness to her it is just as clear what she's talking about in context as it is in the other cases PolitiFact evaluated.

Unfortunately for Pelosi, it's also pretty obvious that she's blaming the job losses near the end of Bush's second term on tax policies implemented during his first term--a classic case of misleading with cherry-picked stats.  To accept her reasoning we would have to rule out the deflation of the housing bubble and the associated problems in the derivatives market as causes for those job losses.

PolitiFact calls Pelosi on the cherry-picking yet somehow succeeds in making it appear that Pelosi makes a good point (bold emphases added):

Pelosi’s statement from last weekend continues the cherry-picking approach: She cited numbers only for jobs created in 2010.

Using the period January 2010 to December 2010, the number of private-sector jobs increased by more than 1.2 million. If Pelosi had used more current numbers, she actually would have had a stronger case: From January 2010 to August 2011, the increase in jobs was almost twice as big -- nearly 2.4 million.

Even the smaller of these two numbers beats Bush’s eight-year jobs increase -- but she continues to conveniently ignore the first year of the Obama administration. If you take the entirety of Obama’s term -- January 2009 to August 2011 -- the nation has lost 1.8 million jobs, which is still worse than what happened under Bush.

Nadeam Elshami, a spokesman for Pelosi, argues that it’s proper to keep the first year of Obama’s tenure out of the equation.

Elshami's rationale is priceless owing to its bankruptcy:

"Republicans may wish to wipe the slate clean and forget about the financial crisis that nearly destroyed our economy and the recession that began under President Bush," said Elshami, a spokesman for Pelosi. "The figures are correct and clearly demonstrate that private-sector jobs are being created, but not fast enough – we have much more to do, and we urge Republicans to join us to pass President Obama’s American Jobs Act."

Far from wanting to forget about the financial crisis, Republicans would want to point out its existence in order to undermine Pelosi's apples-to-oranges comparison.

But again we find PolitiFact offering a torqued corrective (bold emphasis added):

We understand the impulse to make such adjustments, but in Pelosi’s formulation, this principle is applied unequally. If the first year of the Bush administration, which also included a recession, were excluded from her calculation-- this would have magically erased a loss of 2.4 million jobs under Bush. The next seven years of the Bush presidency would have shown a gain of nearly 1.8 million jobs, rather than a loss of 653,000 for the full eight-year period.

Interestingly, if Pelosi had started the count for each president at the beginning of the second year of their presidencies, it would not only have been more defensible methodologically, but it would have also backed up Pelosi's argument better. Leaving out the first year for each president, private-sector job growth under Obama would have been 2.4 million, compared to 1.8 million under Bush.

However, in none of the three statements by Pelosi that we've fact-checked did Pelosi use that method.

If we simply cut out the first year for each president then Bush is relieved of the effects of one recession on job creation while leaving the effects of a second recession.  Obama simply has recessions cut cleanly away.  And that would support Pelosi's argument?  Nonsense.  It leaves us with more apples and oranges.


PolitiFact:

Pelosi compared a select time frame in the Obama administration against the entire length of the Bush administration -- a methodology that treats the two presidents unequally. The irony is that if she had used better methodology, she would have had a sounder argument that more private-sector jobs were created under Obama than under the Bush administration. For her general point, we give Pelosi some credit. For her methodological sins -- repeated at least three times -- we give her thumbs down. On balance, we rate her statement Half True.

In the conclusion we again see PolitiFact trying to push Pelosi's underlying argument even while they criticize her details:  "For her general point, we give Pelosi some credit."  That point doesn't fly even with PolitiFact's spin added.

Because of Pelosi's "methodological sins" PolitiFact drops her down to "Half True"--yet PolitiFact Virginia gave Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia a "Barely True" grade for a claim that was otherwise accurate by the numbers and in terms of its underlying argument simply for his failure to distinguish between gross job creation and net job creation:

But the Virginia governor used net job numbers. Those are different from job creation figures, which are not compiled by the BLS or other national authority. So using net job numbers and calling them job creation figures is a case of comparing apples to oranges.

We rate McDonnell’s claim Barely True.

PolitiFact's rating of Pelosi stands as incredibly generous considering that her point comparing the tax policy of Bush with that of Obama finds absolutely no support in either her version or the PolitiFact spin version.


The grades:

Louis Jacobson:  F
Martha Hamilton:  F

Pelosi's methodological sins barely eclipsed those of the PolitiFact team, and Pelosi didn't have the temerity to call her statement a fact check.


Afters:

Here's a little update on the winners and losers with respect to PolitiFact's favoritism:

Helped by omission
 Rick Perry (True)
 Terry McAuliffe (True)
 Carolyn Maloney (True)
 Brian Moran (True)
 Mitt Romney (True)
 Austan Goolsbee (Mostly True)
 Ed Gillespie (Mostly True)
 Joe Biden (Mostly True)
 Nancy Pelosi (Half True)
 Nancy Pelosi (Half True)
 Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Half True)
 Rick Scott (Half True)
 Tim Pawlenty (Pants on Fire; harmed by omission?)
 John Boehner (False; harmed by omission)

Harmed by inclusion:
 Texas Public Policy Foundation (Half True)
 Rod Smith (False)
 Rick Perry (False)
 Bob McDonnell (Barely True)
 Rick Scott (Pants on Fire)




Correction:  Had incorrect links for the Rick Perry ratings in two spots.  Hat tip to "KnocksvilleE" for pointing out the problem.

PolitiFlub: The argument over job creation in Mitt Romney's Massachusetts

Context matters -- We examine the claim in the full context, the comments made before and after it, the question that prompted it, and the point the person was trying to make.
--Principles of PolitiFact and the Truth-O-Meter

Apparently PolitiFact simply isn't capable of applying the results of its examination.

A  pair of fact check stories published yesterday illustrate the point.

The Obama campaign has hit former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney over his record on job creation in that state.  The Romney campaign has replied with numbers that imply Romney performed well in Massachusetts on job creation.

PolitiFact picks up on the context of battling rhetoric:

Both presidential campaigns are using job statistics to attack each other. President Barack Obama and his allies have spent months criticizing Mitt Romney’s job-creation record as governor of Massachusetts. Now, Romney and his surrogates are arguing that job creation in Massachusetts actually improved on Romney’s watch.

So who’s right?

PolitiFact's wrong, at least if we take its "attack each other" description to apply to this pair of fact checks.  The Obama campaign is attacking.  The Romney campaign is defending.  PolitiFact mischaracterizes the relationship between the two claims and botches at least one of the rulings.

PolitiFact:

For this fact-check, we'll follow our usual approach of looking at the claim in two parts: first, are the numbers correct, and second, how much is the change because of Romney's policies?

The described approach works well, at least potentially, for the attacking claim from Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod.  Axelrod says Massachusetts ranked 47th in job creation under Romney.  The claim only makes sense in the campaign if Romney is significantly responsible for the number.

The same approach is wrong for Eric Fehrnstrom's reply because Fehrnstrom is countering Axelrod's attack.  Fehrnstrom's argument doesn't require credit to Romney for the rise in rankings.  Fehrnstrom's statistic plays its primary role in undercutting Axelrod's argument.  Fehrnstrom, in effect, supplies part of the context that Axelrod deliberately neglected.

PolitiFact often bases its rulings on the degree to which a statement ignores context that might shed different light on a claim.  Fehrnstrom's head and shoulders over Axelrod in that regard in this case, but PolitiFact misreports Fehrnstrom's role in the argument and laughably gives both statements a "Half True" rating.

Want some partisan spin with your fact checking?  PolitiFact's your source.

Grading PolitFact (Ohio): Sherrod Brown and presidential job creation

One of the most common manifestations of liberal media bias occurs when a liberal presupposition goes unchallenged in the context of either an objective news story or in news analysis.  Though PolitiFact apparently continues to present itself as objective news, it is better categorized as news analysis if not editorial opinion.

The issue:

The fact checkers:

Stephen Koff:  writer, researcher
Richard Exner:  researcher
Robert Higgs:  editor

Analysis:

The quotation of Sen. Brown came from a segment of the Rachel Maddow Show.  Maddow segued from a caricature of Marco Rubio's plans for improving the economy to her conversation with Brown:

(MADDOW:) Right now our deficit is around $1 trillion, republicans are proposing to add $3.5 trillion more to it.  Thank you very much. 
Now let them all fall down.  Well done.  There we go.  Don‘t let the door hit your fiscal responsibility when you‘re on your way out.  All right.  Joining us now is democratic Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio.  Senator Brown, thank you for joining us tonight. 
SEN. SHERROD BROWN (D-OH):  You‘re having too much fun, Rachel. 
MADDOW:  I am having too much fun.  Whenever things fail visibly on television, I enjoy myself. 
BROWN:  You do.  And we do!
MADDOW:  Well, thank you.  Let me ask, though, if there is something that I‘m missing aside from good double-stick tape.  Are republicans essentially campaigning on adding all this tax cut stuff to the deficit? 
BROWN:  Yeah, in some sense, what you‘re missing is you‘re only telling half the story, in this way that not only what they‘re doing provably increases the deficit, and did increase the deficit in the first several years of this decade, this century, we know that.  You proved that and we knew that. 
What else it did is it doesn‘t create jobs.  Just contrast the last two eight-year administrations.  During the eight Bush years, 3 million jobs, net jobs created.  During the eight Clinton years, 22 million net jobs created.  So I care about deficits, absolutely.  But what I care even more about is job creation that people have a chance to join the middle class. 
We saw jobs created, 22 million in the Clinton years.  Because they were responsible about cutting taxes selectively and increasing taxes selectively and they were responsible about what government programs they formed and they dismantled.  22 million jobs created and incomes went up in those eight years for the average American.  And in the next eight years, the eight Bush years, only 3 million jobs created and that wasn‘t even enough to keep up with population growth. 
So in that sense, there was a relative decline in job creation.  And wages were flat or worse for the average American.  So—and coupled with that, what the republicans did in eight years is they cut taxes for the richest Americans and they deregulated Wall Street and deregulated worker safety.

Brown makes a ton of dubious claims in the above set of talking points.  PolitiFact Ohio accordingly applies selection bias:

Politicians can slice and dice monthly job reports expertly, a useful skill for scoring economic talking points. Include a few months’ worth of job losses here, exclude some job gains there, or do it in reverse, and pretty soon it’s all some scoundrel’s fault. (Never mind whom that scoundrel is.)

So U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown caught our attention when he took a broader historical look while appearing July 14 on Rachel Maddow’s program on MSNBC.

This, plain and simple, is a laugh.  It is not a "broader historical look" to assess economic policy by looking at the beginning and end points of presidential terms.  It's simply the aforementioned slicing and dicing intended to direct blame at a scoundrel.  The start and finish of a presidential tenure count as relatively arbitrary points in terms of the implementation of economic policy within the ebb and flow of the business cycle.  PolitiFact's failure to pick up on this raises an immediate red flag.

Hold on to your hat, because PolitFact will end up producing red flags like a Leningrad parade in the old Soviet Union:

The quantitative claims seemed worth checking out, and in doing so we found a surprise: Brown is wrong – but not in a way he’ll likely mind. No fan of President George W. Bush, Brown grossly understated the poor job growth that occurred on Bush’s watch.

The comparison should have been this: Job growth through Clinton two terms was 22.7 million. Through Bush’s two terms, it was 1.1 million.

We might ignore the fact that Clinton inherited a recovering economy from President George H. W. Bush while President George W. Bush inherited an economy poised to enter recession, and the fact that banking crisis at the tail end of the latter Bush presidency had a substantial root in Clinton's policy.  But should we ignore those factors while comparing fiscal and economic policy?  Should we ignore those factors while fact checking?

A chart from Heritage Foundation (click chart for enlarged view) helps fill in some of the blanks:

The two worst periods of job creation during the Bush presidency, as the chart helps highlight, occurred during a recession worsened by the destruction of the World Trade Center towers and the banking crisis for which Democrats share considerable blame.  As for Clinton's impressive record of job creation, that was accomplished with the assistance of a Republican-controlled Congress after Clinton inherited an economy on the rebound from recession.

Armed with something more akin to a "broader historical outlook," back to the PolitiFact story:

The quantitative claims seemed worth checking out, and in doing so we found a surprise: Brown is wrong – but not in a way he’ll likely mind. No fan of President George W. Bush, Brown grossly understated the poor job growth that occurred on Bush’s watch.

The fact check on the raw numbers proves satisfactory--but isn't Brown doing far more than making a comparison between the net job creation numbers for Clinton and Bush?  He has an underlying argument supposedly girded by those numbers, doesn't he?  So what is it?

Skipping over the justification for the 1.1 million figure, PolitiFact continues:

OK, but what about Brown’s claim that incomes went up under Clinton?

The numbers bear this out, too. BLS data, adjusted for inflation, show that average weekly wages grew by 21 percent from the start of Clinton’s first term to the end of his second term. They grew by only 2 percent under Bush’s two terms.

OK, so what's Brown's argument based on these numbers?

PolitiFact:

Is it fair to compare job growth under these presidents? Just in case we were missing some context – because these numbers seemed to turn conventional wisdom of its head -- we ran this by Dan Mitchell, an economist and fan of fiscal restraint who works as a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian-oriented think tank. Mitchell said he didn’t find the numbers surprising. Luck and the economic cycle played a role in both presidencies, but the officeholders’ policies played bigger roles, he said. Citing free-trade agreements, welfare reform and deregulation in the telecommunications and agriculture industries, Mitchell said that Clinton’s economic policies were actually geared more to free markets than Bush’s, and the results speak for themselves.

Mitchell, unsurprisingly, makes some of the points to which I alluded above while giving appropriate credit to Clinton for favoring free markets in his economic approach.

But if Clinton's success occurred largely because of a free market approach, besting Bush in terms of conservatism, then might there be consequences for Brown's underlying argument?  And speaking of Brown's underlying argument, does PolitiFact have any insight as to what it might be?

Sorry, folks!  It's conclusion time already:

But that’s for others to argue. Bush, while insisting on tax cuts, faced a national security crisis unparalleled in the last half-century, and his response – including wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – had serious economic consequences.  Political values, including those of Sen. Brown, shape the debate on whether the president took the right or wrong approach. As for us, we’re sticking to the factual claims.

Brown’s numbers on Bush were off, but his point was right on target. We rate his statement True.

"(H)is point was right on target."  Apparently PolitiFact takes Brown to mean simply that Clinton's job creation numbers were much better than Bush's measured from the start to the end of their two terms.  But the caveats discussed above make that an effectively meaningless comparison except perhaps, as Cato's Mitchell put it, as a measure of Clinton's free market savvy.  But seriously, doesn't the context demand that Brown's underlying argument is something other than that?

The whole of the Maddow-Brown interchange amounts to an attack on the notion of cutting taxes to grow the economy.  Brown tried to make the  point that cutting taxes does not create jobs, using the Clinton/Bush comparison to prove his point.  Review the transcript:

"What else it did is it doesn‘t create jobs.  Just contrast the last two eight-year administrations.  During the eight Bush years, 3 million jobs, net jobs created.  During the eight Clinton years, 22 million net jobs created."

Without specifically identifying Brown's point, PolitiFact declares his point "right on target."  But given the information above, it should be obvious that Brown's intended point--that tax cuts do not create jobs--cannot find reasonable support in the Clinton/Bush comparison.

PolitiFact again ignored the clear underlying argument of a Democratic Party figure.  The supposed fact check serves to frame, rather than interpret, Brown's statement in the most favorable manner possible.  Any communication deserves charitable interpretation.  Charitable framing, however, should not be the business of a fact checker.  That is the job of public relations workers and partisan spinners.

The grades:

Stephen Koff:  F
Richard Exner: F
Robert Higgs:  F

Exner may have done a fine job, but the research on this story is so thin that he gets an "F" by default.  I like to hope that he made some sort of comment to the writer and editor to the effect that their story was fundamentally flawed.

Grading PolitiFact (Virginia): Tim Kaine on jobs & pop

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

The issue:

The fact checkers:

Sean Gorman:  writer, researcher
Warren Fiske:  editor

Analysis:

Kaine's claim obviously represents a numbers claim, so we'll be on the lookout for the underlying point.  That's the most important thing when fact checking a numbers claim.  Or so it is said.

Take it away, PolitiFact:

Kaine said in a speech that during the Bush administration "while the population in that period grew by 10 percent, the number of jobs in the nation grew by 1 percent."

We wondered if that was really the case. Alec Gerlach, a DNC spokesman, couldn’t identify the source on which the former Virginia governor based his claim. So we tried to find it on our own, comparing census records from January 2001 - the month Bush was sworn in - to January 2009, when Bush left office.

It makes sense to investigate the raw numbers prior to assessing the underlying point.

PolitiFact found that the population increased by about 7.8 percent according to Census Bureau estimates.  Kaine's number was inflated by about 22 percent in order to reach the minimum reasonable interpretation of "10 percent" (9.5 percent).  Insisting on the full 10 percent--and I don't--would represent an inflation of about 36 percent.

Additionally, PolitiFact found that non-farm employment increased only about .83 percent from the start of Bush's two terms to the end.  Kaine could be viewed as doing Bush a favor by rounding that figure up to 1 percent.

While Kaine’s numbers are a little off on employment and census, he’s right in suggesting that that U.S. population grew 10 times faster that (sic) jobs during George W. Bush’s presidency.

Hmmm.  Could that be the underlying point?  Or was it hidden in the three paragraphs' worth of caveats?

Even so, several economists told us comparing raw population growth and job numbers is not a preferred way to examine job creation versus demand. That’s because not all of the new people -- such as babies born during the Bush administration -- need jobs.

We were told a more meaningful measure is labor force participation: the percentage of the population between 16 and 64 that is either employed or looking for work. According to BLS, participation was at 67.2 percent when Bush took office and 65.7 percent when he left.

Here’s another thing to keep in mind: Economists have told us time and again -- on this claim and others -- that the policies of presidents and governors have only minor impact on economic cycles and job creation. "They get too much credit and too much blame," said Sylvia A. Allegretto, economist at the Institute for Research on Labor & Employment at the University of California, Berkeley.

... and hinted at in the introductory paragraph(?):

Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine may not have given the crowd at the Feb. 19 Jefferson-Jackson Dinner in Richmond the scoop on whether he’s running for the U.S. Senate, but he made no secret of his disdain for former President George W. Bush’s record on job creation.

No, apparently the 10:1 thing was the underlying point, if the conclusion is any indication:

Kaine’s numbers are a little off his and spokesman doesn’t know where they came from. Even so, his suggestion that population growth outpaced job growth by a ratio of 10 to 1 is pretty much on the mark, so we rate his claim Mostly True.

The grades:

Sean Gorman:  F
Warren Fiske:  F

The grades assume that Bill Adair knows what he's talking about when he says the underlying argument is the most important aspect of a numbers claim.  Making the supposed 10:1 ratio the underlying point is little better than making the raw numbers the underlying point (and thus the same as the superficial point).


Afters:

The presentation by Gorman and Fiske left it unclear just how far off the mark Kaine ended up with respect to the supposed 10:1 ratio.  Divide 7.8 by .83 and the resulting 9.4 ends up reflecting a ratio closer to 9:1  than 10:1.

PolitiFact 2011: A review

PolitiFact Bias has now spent approximately a full year highlighting criticisms of the PolitiFact fact checking brand.

Our hopes that PolitiFact would improve its performance in light of outside criticism have gone largely unfulfilled.  Perhaps the biggest improvement was the reconciliation of two differing definitions of the "Half True" rating, but that modest accomplishment occurred without any announcement or acknowledgment at all from PolitiFact.  By contrast, PolitiFact wrote extensively about its momentous change in calling its fourth rating from the top "Mostly False" rather than "Mostly True" even though the definition remained the same.

Here's a rundown of the issues that should keep discerning readers from trusting PolitiFact:

1)  PolitiFact persistently ignores the effects of selection bias.  It simply isn't plausible that editors who are very probably predominantly liberal will choose stories of interest on a neutral basis without some systematic check on ideological bias.  PolitiFact, for example, continues to publish candidate report cards as though selection bias has no effect on the report card data.

2)  PolitiFact continues to publish obviously non-objective stories without employing the journalistic custom of using labels like "commentary," "opinion" or even "news analysis."  Readers are implicitly led to believe that stories like an editorial "Lie of the Year" selection are objective news stories.

3)  PolitiFact continues to routinely apply its principles of analysis unevenly, as with its interpretation of job creation claims (are the claims assumed to refer to gross job creation or net job creation?).

4)  PolitiFact has yet to shake its penchant for snark.  Snark has no place in objective reporting (see #2 above).  Unfortunately, PolitiFact treats it like a selling point instead of a weakness, and PolitiFact's intentional use of it has apparently influenced Annenberg Fact Check to follow suit.

There is a silver lining.  PolitiFact's methods produce perhaps the best opportunity yet to objectively measure mainstream media bias.  Some of those projects will be published at PolitiFact Bias over the coming year, with the study specifics available through Google Docs.

An emergency need for long-term growth?

I dropped by a favorite Web site, whitehouse.gov, to see what kind of content is posted now that the president's team has had a chance to practice. The link to Obama's economic plan jumped out at me, so I clicked it.

What I read there seems to belie the reports that Barack Obama is an intelligent man. See what I mean:

President Obama believes that if we do not act quickly, this recession could linger for years – and America could lose the competitive edge that has served as the foundation for our strength and standing in the world.

That's why the President has put forth an American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan that will jumpstart job creation and long-term growth by:

• Doubling the production of alternative energy in the next three years.
• Modernizing more than 75% of federal buildings and improve the energy efficiency of two million American homes, saving consumers and taxpayers billions on our energy bills.
• Making the immediate investments necessary to ensure that within five years, all of America’s medical records are computerized.
• Equipping tens of thousands of schools, community colleges, and public universities with 21st century classrooms, labs, and libraries.
• Expanding broadband across America, so that a small business in a rural town can connect and compete with their counterparts anywhere in the world.
• Investing in the science, research, and technology that will lead to new medical breakthroughs, new discoveries, and entire new industries.

On January 8th, 2009 -- less than two weeks before taking office -- President Obama spoke on the need for urgent action on his American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan to save or create over 3 million jobs while investing in priorities like health care, energy, and education that will jumpstart economic growth. The plan represents not just a new policy, but a new approach to meeting our most urgent challenges.

Note: Word is that "investment" is the Democratic euphemism for government spending. Focus groups evidently prefer that language by a wide margin.

We've got a recession, Obama says, so we need to stimulate the economy to end the recession. Great. With you there, Mr. President.

If we don't stimulate the economy then we could lose our "competitive edge." Hmmm. I don't know why that would follow from a recession unless we're in a recession that other countries aren't experiencing. From what I can tell, pretty much the whole world is getting the opportunity to experience this one right along with us.

Did the president just use the recession to justify addressing a separate social concern? That is, our ability to compete globally? Do we look like suckers?

So then we look at the outline of the president's plan. He wants to stimulate job creation. With you there, Mr. President. How do you propose to stimulate job creation?

• He wants to subsidize less efficient energy sources (which will almost certainly make energy costs rise).
• He wants to make homes and businesses more energy-efficient. At least that will help offset the higher prices promised by his first initiative. On the other hand, it's going to take energy to save energy, so this idea looks like an overall loss.
• He wants to computerize medical records. Look out, economy. Watch the boom from this one. I'll be watching the ACLU response to this one. Can we trust the government with our private information? Or are medical records no big deal whereas cell phone conversations are sacrosanct? Seriously, this one doesn't look like a big boost for the economy and it figures to put some persons who work in medical records out of work.
• He wants to modernize schools. Again, where are the jobs from this? Looks like a sop for the teachers unions.
• Expand broadband access. Won't that take time? And even if it gets done quickly, businesses don't compete simply by having broadband access. It takes either money or computer savvy to compete on the Web.
• Invest in science and research. Aren't we doing that already? Perhaps he's saying that the government will borrow money and spend even more on reseach. The researchers are bound to like it. They'll have jobs. But this one is clearly focused on the long term.

And that's it. That's the plan. Good-bye recession based on this? He must be joking. He didn't even mention the good ideas that he passed on to Congress. Tax cuts. There's something that will stimulate the economy in the short term. Why not mention it on your Web site, Mr. President?

(for Glenn Kessler and PolitiFact) How to fact check the job recovery numbers

A valuable media watchdog watchdog post at the new blog "counterirritant" pointed out a problem with Glenn Kessler's fact check of a claim from Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

Kessler writes the fact checker feature for the Washington Post.  Romney claimed that in a normal recovery from recession the country should be adding something like 500,000 jobs per month.

counterirritant:

Kessler decided that the best way to “check” this was determine how frequently 500,000 jobs were created in a month in the last 65 year.

The post goes on to very effectively criticize Kessler's methodology throughout.

By a funny coincidence (general leftward lean of the mainstream media, maybe?), PolitiFact used very similar reasoning on the same claim:

Is 500,000 jobs created per month normal for a recovery?

The short answer is "no."

We arrived at this conclusion by looking at the net monthly change in jobs all the way back to 1970. Since Romney was referring to total jobs, rather than private-sector jobs only, we used total jobs as our measurement. And since Romney was talking about job creation patterns during a recovery, we looked only at job creation figures for non-recessionary periods, as defined by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Finally, we excluded the current recovery.

The Kessler/PolitiFact method is entirely wrongheaded.

Romney didn't claim that 500,000 jobs created per month was a normal figure during a recovery.  I can imagine the furrowed brows of Kessler, Louis Jacobson and other mainstream media fact checkers.  Aren't they the experts?  What am I talking about?

It's actually pretty simple.

The size of the economy changes.  If country A enters a recession losing 1 million jobs  then it takes two months to regain the lost jobs at a rate of 500,000 per month.  If country B experiences a recession losing 10 million jobs then it takes 20 months to regain them at a rate of 500,000 per month.

Not only does the size of the economy vary, but so does the depth of the recession.  The rate of recovery for lost jobs needs  to account for both factors.  Neither Kessler nor PolitiFact gave any apparent consideration to those critical criteria.  It's like comparing prices between now and the 1950s without adjusting for inflation.

The Romney campaign has made a number of statements like the 500,000 jobs claim, and they probably relate to the following chart or one like it from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

Clipped from nytimes.com

Romney's claim almost certainly derives from the fact that post-war recoveries usually replace lost jobs much faster than the present recovery. 

So how does one check that claim?  It's not that hard.  Take the bottom point of employment, then count the number of months that it takes to get employment back up to the peak level.  Divide the number of jobs lost by the number of months it took to return to return to the employment peak at the start of the recession.  Do the same for each of the post-war recessions, then average the numbers to obtain the average job recovery time.  After all of that, divide the number of jobs lost from the 2007 recession by the averaged job recovery time.

Why didn't the Washington Post or PolitiFact do anything remotely resembling the fact check I just described?  It could be gross incompetence.  It could be ideological bias.  Or it could be both.





Correction 6/7/2012  Removed a redundant division operation from the next-to-last paragraph

Grading PolitiFact: Mike Pence and the job-killing financial regulation bill

What is it with these Republicans and their violent rhetoric?


The issue:

PolitiFact.com

Note the date of the statement from Pence.  July 15, 2010.  Such a timely fact check!  What brings this on?

The fact checkers:

Louis Jacobson:  writer, researcher
Morris Kennedy:  editor

Analysis:

The subject, as noted above, is the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill that was passed with very little help from Republicans.

PolitiFact:

The law is complex -- here is a summary assembled by the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee -- but in general, the bill created an independent consumer protection agency, established new ways to liquidate failed financial firms, created a council to warn about systemic risks to the financial system and tighten regulatory scrutiny of the financial system while increasing transparency.

The portions of the summary mentioned by PolitiFact all come from the "Highlights of the bill" section of the summary.  The summary also includes stuff such as this:

Costs to Financial Firms, Not Taxpayers: Charges the largest financial firms $50 billion for an upfront fund, built up over time, that will be used if needed for any liquidation. Industry, not the taxpayers, will take a hit for liquidating large, interconnected financial companies.

The pledge that industry rather than taxpayers take the hit for bailout costs is laughable, by the way.  Such costs are always passed on to the consumer.  That even includes people who don't ordinarily pay federal taxes, like a person below poverty level who has late charges levied on their bank account.  In short, the bill sets up a tax that is embedded in the cost of doing banking.

On July 15, 2010, shortly after the Senate passed the measure, then-House Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence, R-Ind., released a statement critical of the bill. In part, it said, "This so-called financial reform bill will kill jobs, raise taxes, restrict the flow of credit, make bailouts permanent and turn the Democrats’ disastrous too-big-to-fail approach into federal law."

(...)

As part of our look at the range of bills that have been attacked as "job-killing," we thought we'd look at whether the charge is accurate when leveled against the Dodd-Frank bill.

 So there's the fact they're checking.  On with the fact check:

Job creation under Roosevelt

While searching for information about job creation numbers during the Great Depression, I stumbled across this excellent video from Reason TV:

Grading PolitiFact: Newt Gingrich and the "food stamp president"

Context matters -- We examine the claim in the full context, the comments made before and after it, the question that prompted it, and the point the person was trying to make.
--Principles of PolitiFact and the Truth-O-Meter

The issue:

(clipped from PolitiFact.com)

The fact checkers:

Louis Jacobson:  writer, researcher
Bill Adair:  editor

Analysis:

This fact check reminds me of the job the same PolitiFact team (Jacobson, Adair) did on conservative pundit Laura Ingraham on the same day.

Sometimes it doesn't matter what you say.  It just matters what fact PolitiFact wants to check.

Here we go again:

On the May 15, 2011, edition of NBC’s Meet the Press, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich defended his earlier characterization of President Barack Obama as "the most successful food stamp president in American history."

Host David Gregory first showed a clip of Gingrich’s earlier comment, made at a Georgia Republican Party dinner.

As with the Ingraham fact check, the beginning's not half bad.  And the similarity persists with the subsequent decline:

"You want to be a country that creates food stamps, in which case frankly Obama's is an enormous success," Gingrich said in the recorded excerpt. "The most successful food stamp president in American history.  Or do you want to be a country that creates paychecks?"

Gregory went on to ask Gingrich if his statement had "racist overtones."  Journalists are great.

Gingrich waved off that question.

PolitiFact:

Gregory responded, "What did you mean? What was the point?"

Gingrich replied, "That's, that's bizarre. That -- this kind of automatic reference to racism, this is the president of the United States. The president of the United States has to be held accountable. Now, the idea that -- and what I said is factually true.  Forty-seven million Americans are on food stamps.  One out of every six Americans is on food stamps."

From there, PolitiFact zeroed in the the 47 million figure and went about its fact check.  This time they remembered to check the underlying point, which they identified as Gingrich blaming Obama for the record number of people receiving food stamps.

I wish I was kidding.

PolitiFact's approach to the fact check is profoundly wrongheaded.  Note the exchange between Gregory and Gingrich immediately subsequent to the portion PolitiFact used:

MR. GREGORY:  Well, what did you mean?

REP. GINGRICH:  Well, it's very simple.  He has policies--and I used a very direct analogy.  He follows the same destructive political model that destroyed the city of Detroit.  I follow the model that Rick Perry and others have used to create more jobs in Texas.  You know, Texas two out of the last four years created more jobs than the other 49 states combined.  I'm suggesting we know how to create jobs.  Ronald Reagan did it.  I was part of that.  We know how to create jobs.  We did it when I was speaker.  And, and the way you create jobs is you have lower taxes, you have less regulation, you have litigation reform.  When the New York Stock Exchange puts its headquarters at Amsterdam, Holland and, by the way, follows 40 other companies in the last year; when General Electric pays zero in taxes; there's something fundamentally wrong with the current system.  The Obama system of the National Labor Relations Board basically breaking the law to try to punish Boeing and to threaten every right-to-work state.  The Environmental Protection Agency trying to control the entire American economy by bureaucratic fiat.  The Obama system's going to lead us down the path to Detroit and destruction.  I think we need a brand-new path.  It's a path of job creation.  And one of the central themes of this campaign is going to be paychecks vs. food stamps.

msnbc transcript

If PolitiFact paid attention to "the full context, the comments made before and after it, the question that prompted it, and the point the person was trying to make," it's certainly difficult to tell from the finished work.  The PolitiFact story offers no hint of Gingrich's full answer to Gregory's repeat of the question.


PolitiFact:

We're not going to address the racial implications but decided to check Gingrich's main comment. We see two points to investigate. First, are Gingrich’s numbers accurate? And second, is it fair to blame Obama for today's high use of food stamps?

PolitiFact does not address the racial implications.  I'm speechless.

It's fair to check Gingrich's figure of 47 million on food stamps.  But Gingrich does not blame Obama for the number of people on food stamps.  Rather, he used food stamps as an "analogy" (metaphor's more like it) to Obama's approach of relying on government action rather than private initiative.  It isn't that Obama gave out food stamps, it's that he did not pursue successful job-creating policies.  PolitiFact somehow must have missed Gingrich's explanation while hastening to figure out if Obama is to blame for the number of food stamp recipients.

As it turns out, the SNAP program has 44.2 million beneficiaries, so Gingrich was a bit high with his number.  Gingrich likely conflated food stamps with poverty, since the numbers he used match the numbers used in news reports for the latter.  Be that as it may, the number of recipients Gingrich mentioned represents an inflation of 6.3 percent and PolitiFact makes no big deal of that degree of inaccuracy.

PolitiFact's subsequent foray into the blame game misses the point, as noted above, so we'll skip to the end to see how it turns out:

Gingrich was close on the numbers of Americans receiving SNAP benefits. In addition, the number of beneficiaries is at a record level, and it has risen every month of the Obama presidency. On the other hand, Gingrich oversimplifies when he suggests that Obama should be considered "the most successful food stamp president in American history," because much -- though probably not all -- of the reason for the increase was a combination of the economic problems Obama inherited and a longstanding upward trend from policy changes. On balance, we rate Gingrich’s statement Half True.

One cannot rightly rate something "on balance" when the evaluation itself is unbalanced.

Gingrich's analogy does not even require record-setting numbers of food-stamp recipients.  His point, as he stated, was the nature of Obama's approach to job creation.

(chart clipped from data.bls.gov)

With the unemployment rate high along with the number of food stamp recipients, it's hard to argue with Gingrich's point.  Calling it "racist" might be the most effective defense.

The grades:

Louis Jacobson:  F
Bill Adair:  F

If this PolitiFact team could miss the obvious context of Gingrich's statement, I have even more confidence that they succeeded in similarly botching the Ingraham fact check.  In the latter case I have yet to locate the missing context.


May 18, 2011:  Went with "Gingrich waved off that question" rather than "Gingrich waved off that comment" and altered tense in a number of places.  Restored the gone-missing quote of the final paragraph from the PolitiFact story and added a hotlink to my review of the Ingraham story.

Grading PolitiFact (Florida): Rick Scott and private sector Stimulus jobs

Rick Scott is the Republican candidate for Florida governor headed into the 2010 election.

The issue:

The fact checkers:

Becky Bowers:  writer, researcher
Shirl Kennedy:  researcher
John Bartosek:  editor


Analysis:

What did Rick Scott say, exactly?


Find the full transcript in the Afters section.

Higher taxes kill jobs.  Regulations kill jobs.  ObamaCare is an unbelievable job killer.  It's going to be devastating for our state.  Um, I mean, that, by itself, uh, is going to make it very difficult, uh, for people in the business (?) in our state.  One--and the taxes--increase in taxes for that, uh, is going to be devastating for our state.  On top of that, what my background is I put my money up, I took the risk, I stood up for what I believed in, starting businesses.  And that's a whole different background than other people.  But, and, she clearly believes in higher taxes, she clearly believes in ObamaCare, she care--clearly believes in stimulus, and we know that the Stimulus has not created one private sector job.

Though this looks like a straightforward claim that the Stimulus bill produced no private sector jobs, campaign spokesman Joe Kildea approached it as though Scott's remark referred to something like net job creation in the private sector, in Florida particularly:

"It's a ridiculous assertion that the stimulus has created jobs," Kildea said. "That's exactly the reason Floridians are so upset with the direction of the economy. No matter what sort of intellectual gymnastics used by Obama liberals, the fact is that when the stimulus was first signed, Florida's unemployment rate was 9.2% and today it is 11.6% and the state lost a net of almost 200,000 jobs."

Of course, if Florida lost 250,000 public sector jobs during that time frame (admittedly doubtful), then it would still follow that private sector jobs had been created to the tune of about 50,000.  So Kildea's approach ends up looking like spin.  PolitiFact's immediate response to Kildea was appropriately skeptical:

So, because more jobs were lost overall than gained, that's the same as saying not one job has been created?

If Scott is charitably taken to say that Florida has not gained any new net private sector jobs as a result of the Stimulus, then his mode of expression was needlessly misleading.

Much of the PolitiFact story by Becky Bowers investigates whether private sector jobs exist and/or are paid through Stimulus funds.  The story treats Scott's claim as literal and responds to attempts by Scott's campaign to explain the statement.  But something goes almost entirely missing from Bowers' story, only arising thanks to Bowers' inclusion of a quotation of Sean Snaith:

Sean Snaith, a University Of Central Florida economist who has been critical of the effect of the stimulus, agrees that saying "the stimulus has not created one private sector job" is inaccurate.

"I think that's an exaggeration of the reality, which is that it didn't do very much for private sector hiring," he said. "But surprise, surprise, in politics there's hyperbole sometimes."

It's more than hyperbole to Billy Weston. Here’s his reaction to Scott’s statement:

"I disagree. I have to. Even though, you know, I'm a devout Republican, that's absolutely wrong," he said. "I'm living proof that this helped out, tremendously. I couldn't agree with that statement whatsoever. I know, due to this program, I have a job at Sancilio & Co. That's the reality of it."

Snaith identified an argument underlying Scott's literal statement, and that suggested argument fits very well the context of Scott's remarks.  Though Bower retains partial credit for including the quotation of Snaith, the rest of the story pays no attention to the underlying argument.

Snaith also called Scott's controversial claim "hyperbole."  PolitiFact countered that with the somewhat out-of-context quotation of Billy Weston.  Bower's frames Weston's statement with "It's more than hyperbole to Billy Weston."  The most charitable way to understand "more than hyperbole" is "not hyperbole."  Weston did not take Scott's statement as hyperbole at all.  And Weston's view is fair because while Scott's statement may incidentally function as exaggeration for emphasis it is doubtful that many listeners would take it that way.

Scott most likely used a spurious fact to drive his underlying argument.  If he meant it literally then he was wrong.  If he meant it as hyperbole then the attempt was too awkward and misleading to qualify for most listeners.  Either way, the underlying argument is the same.  To express it using Snaith's words, the Stimulus bill "didn't do very much for private sector hiring."

Though Bowers mentions the underlying argument through the quotation of Snaith, the underlying argument is simply dropped when reading the "Truth-O-Meter":

"His position on stimulus hasn't changed," Colby said. "If the argument is that the stimulus is the only way to create jobs, it's false."

But that isn’t Scott’s statement. In the face of Billy Weston and now 1,300 jobs at a company Scott partly owns, his campaign still hasn’t moved from its stance that "the stimulus has not created one private sector job."  He may disagree that the stimulus is the most effective use of funds, or argue as Snaith does that "it didn't do very much." But those aren’t the words he chose.

With thousands of Floridians employed because of stimulus-funded programs — not to mention jobs for a company in which Scott owns stock — we rate his statement Pants on Fire.

With the underlying argument gone AWOL, PolitiFact ends up grading only the literal truth of Scott's claim.  Scott earns considerable criticism for what is at best described as a poor attempt at hyperbole, but it is not fair to exclude all consideration of the underlying argument while grading the truth of his statement.

The grades:

Becky Bowers:  F
Shirl Kennedy:  B
John Bartosek:  F

Clearly Scott had an argument underlying his use of the "not created one private sector job" claim.  Bowers and Bartosek's grades reflect their aiming of the focus of the story to the near total exclusion of Scott's underlying argument.  Kennedy apparently provided research appropriate for that focus and presumably was not involved in framing the story.

Afters:

My full transcript of the video.

SPT/MH:
I wanted to ask you about, um, your proposed--you and Alex Sink pretty much agree that you got to create jobs.  Um, or that one of the priorities is to, is to have Florida get more jobs.  What do you see the differences between how you approach that and she approaches that?

RS:
Oh, I think it's clear.  I mean, um, she supports President Obama's agenda, uh, she, she supports the Stimulus, she supports ObamaCare, she supports eliminating--or not extending the Bush tax cuts, so it's clear.  I mean, there's a big difference.

SPT/MH:
OK, that's an economic philosophy I guess.  How about when it comes to--can you, I guess, expand on that--

RS:
Hold on for a second (inaudible).

SPT/MH:
As it relates to creating jobs.  I mean, give me more specifics so I can explain that to people.

RS:
Oh, I think it's very simple.

SPT/MH
OK.

RS:
Higher taxes kill jobs.  Regulations kill jobs.  ObamaCare is an unbelievable job killer.  It's going to be devastating for our state.  Um, I mean, that, by itself, uh, is going to make it very difficult, uh, for people in the business (?) in our state.  One--and the taxes--increase in taxes for that, uh, is going to be devastating for our state.  On top of that, what my background is I put my money up, I took the risk, I stood up for what I believed in, starting businesses.  And that's a whole different background than other people.  But, and, she clearly believes in higher taxes, she clearly believes in ObamaCare, she care--clearly believes in stimulus, and we know that the Stimulus has not created one private sector job.

I've observed the convention of capitalizing "Stimulus" where it seems to refer to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

AP Spin Meter flunks logic, spins story

The Associated Press (unwittingly?) turned "Spin Meter" into a pun with today's story on a supposed inconsistency by the GOP.

The AP story, carrying Donna Cassata's byline, charges that Republicans regard defense spending as a job creator while also claiming that government spending does not create jobs.

Cassata's story contains four main problems.

First, Cassata produces very little quoted material to support her claims about what GOP politicians supposedly say.

Second, the quotations she uses fail to support the story's claim of a reversal, inconsistency or contradiction (however one wishes to interpret her claim):

Running for re-election, Rep. Howard "Buck" McKeon, R-Calif., said in February 2010 that the stimulus package did not create new jobs. In a statement about the economy and jobs now on his website, McKeon says "congressional Democrats and the administration continue to insist that we can spend our way out of this recession and create jobs, but the numbers just don't add up."

But at a hearing last week, McKeon, now the committee chairman, argued against cuts to the military, saying, "We don't spend money on defense to create jobs. But defense cuts are certainly a path to job loss, especially among our high-skilled workforces. There is no private sector alternative to compensate for the government's investment."

He later added, "While cuts to the military might reduce federal spending, they harm national security and they definitely don't lead to job growth."

There simply isn't any contradiction in McKeon's statements.

Cassata appears to simply assume the presence of a contradiction, and tries to sustain the impression for the reader's sake with stuff like this:

Asked about the competing statements, a spokesman for McKeon, Claude Chafin, said they were "not inconsistent" because the defense industry is a unique recipient of federal dollars.

Note how it is taken for granted that the statements compete with one another.  Pulling the two word snippet ("not inconsistent") from Chafin makes his response look like a thin denial if not a case of the fallacy of special pleading.

One should note that special pleading is not a fallacy where special circumstances obtain, not that McKeon ultimately needs to argue that point.

Third, and stemming from the second failure, Cassata fails to make any type of logical case for McKeon (or the GOP) offering an inconsistent view of government spending.  As McKeon made very clear in his statement, concerns over jobs lost from government cuts are separate from concerns over net job creation.

Fourth, Cassata enters the dreaded realm of liberal media bias.  By the time her story concludes it could pass for an op-ed extolling the virtues of government spending as a means of producing jobs, with that thesis reliant on the writings of a Keynesian economist with a strong record of giving money to liberal politicians.

I will emphasize that my point is not that Robert Pollin's work should not be trusted because of his partisanship.  The point is that a fact check should not arbitrarily take sides in a controversy and call it a fact check.  The truth is that Pollin's opinion has no real relevance to McKeon's consistency.  It may have relevance to McKeon's position that stimulus spending did not work, but if that's the case then Pollin should have to explain the apparently dismal results of the stimulus bill.

Conclusion:  The Spin Meter is spinning.

Grading PolitiFact's grading of the stimulus bill

The PolitiFact headline caught my eye.  Here's how it looked at FaceBook:

I will focus on two general aspects of this PolitiFact entry, the visual presentation and the literary content.

The appearance of the FaceBook version offers special prominence to the bar graph seen just below "PolitFact.com."  Once one gets to the full story by clicking the link, one has the opportunity to read a caption that describes the graph as part of the Obama administration's claims about itself ("David Plouffe, a political adviser to President Obama, circulated this chart ...").  I would suggest that the placement of the graphic provides an implicit support of the positive effects of the stimulus bill.  That effect is only slightly diminished at the main page, coupled as it is with the Truth-O-Meter rating of one of Vice President Joe Biden's  claims about reduced job losses over time.

So the visual presentation makes the stimulus bill look pretty good, even if the arguments underlying the presentation may be specious.  But what about the content?

The content, considering the piece is billed as a grade of the stimulus bill, contains precious little grading.  Indeed, it might not exaggerate the situation to state that authors Robert Farley and Louis Jacobson did not offer any specific effective/not effective judgment at all.  Instead, they treated the reader to a series of of political statements and expert opinions--more in line with the traditional methods of the objective reporting paradigm.

The story isn't exactly the best example of objective reporting, however.  In spite of a number of research references to Heritage.org, the assessment of the experts at Heritage apparently did not find their way into the Farley/Jacobson story.

Is that important?

Yes, it is.  Economists disagree on many things, and the Keynesian approach to economic intervention remains a very contentious point.  However, though Keynesian policies remain controversial among economists, they also remain very popular.  Thus, it is easy to find a good number--even a clear majority--who will affirm that Keynesian spending will effectively boost an economy.

The uncited work of Brian Riedl at Heritage.org offers a counterpoint to the entirety of the PolitiFact story:

Heritage Foundation, "Why Government Spending Does Not Stimulate Economic Growth: Answering the Critics," by Brian M. Riedl, Jan. 5, 2010  

Heritage Foundation,"White House Report Claims Stimulus Success-Despite 3.5 Million Job Losses," by Brian M. Riedl, Jan. 14, 2010  

Heritage Foundation, "CBO Says Stimulus Is Working Because We Predicted It Would," by Brian Riedl, Dec. 1, 2009  

The first of these articles provides an excellent explanation of Keynesian economics, by the way.

Farley and Jacobson end up relying on Keynesian assumptions to imply the success of the Keynesian stimulus.  It is worth noting that the third article by Riedl listed above, "CBO Says Stimulus Is Working Because We Predicted It Would," deals with that same aspect of begging the question.

CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf proclaimed that (Keynesian) economists' predictions of job creation were more accurate than the records of those spending the stimulus money.  But if that's the case, how would one ever test the accuracy of the predictions in the first place?  What is the origin of their predictive cachet?

Therein lies the mystery.  The Keynesian economists say Keynesian economic approaches work just great.  News/opinion outfits such as PolitiFact report what the Keynesians say.  So it must be true, right?

PolitiFact offered no grades as such in this story.  But even though I took a less formal approach than usual on this post, I will offer some grades:

Robert Farley:  F
Louis Jacobson:  F
Catharine Richert:  C

Though I don't know who researched what, Catharin Richert only did research on this piece.  As a result, she's off the hook for the implicit logical errors in the content, including such things as the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.  It was great that Riedl's work appeared in the list of sources, but unfortunate that the content of the story appeared to entirely ignore Riedl's contribution to the argument.

Overall, this PolitiFact story was a faux fact check.  All it did was affirm that Keynesian economists affirm the Keynesian approach.  As Riedl points out, with no thanks due to PolitiFact, at some point the empirical data from economic outcomes need to support the Keynesian models or else the latter are open to question.  It looks like PolitiFact cherry-picked its expert commentary.


Afters:

One of the key experts cited in the PolitiFact story was Gus Faucher, director of macroeconomics at Moody's economy.com.  "Augustine" Faucher's FEC-listed political contributions have all been to Democrats, including a $300 gift to the Obama campaign in Sept. 2008.

Does that mean that we can't trust Faucher?  No, it isn't so simple as that.  Faucher undoubtedly believes in Keynesian principles and government intervention in markets, so his comments as to their effectiveness are simply what we should expect regardless of whether he supported Obama's candidacy.  Faucher's politics when added to his predisposition toward the Keynesian approach should cause us to take his expertise with a grain of salt, though.  He is not a neutral party on this issue.



March 3, 2010
Corrected typographical error on the spelling of Gus Faucher's name (I had spelled it "Guy Faucher").  Apologies to Mr. Faucher and my reader(s).

Pelosi: Pass the bill to find out what's in it?

Over the past week or so, quite a few conservative pundits have taken a whack at Nancy Pelosi over the following statement:  "(W)e have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it."
 
Recently a Salem Radio Network news segment stated that Pelosi's statement had been taken out of context, and that finding out what is in the bill was, in effect, receiving the benefits of the bill.  Salem carries primarily conservative and evangelical radio programming, so a claim of this type carries weight automatically since it runs counter to the network's interests (at least in some respects) to feature this type of item in the news.

Who is right?  Let's get Speaker Pelosi's version:

“President Obama said, one year ago, when he called the first bipartisan, on March 5th of last year, the first bipartisan House and Senate meeting together with many outside stakeholders together at the White House, to find a way for us to come together. And at that time, he said: ‘Health care reform is entitlement reform.’  We cannot sustain the upward spiral of the increases in health care and what that means in Medicare and what it means in Medicaid. So from the standpoint of our national budget, and for your budgets, the current system, as I said, is unsustainable. 

“Again, it’s unaffordable for families, individuals and families, for businesses of any size, and it is a cost to our economy.  Imagine an economy where people could follow their aspirations, where they could be entrepreneurial, where they could take risks professionally because personally their families health care needs are being met.  Where they could be self-employed or start a business, not be job-locked in a job because they have health care there, and if they went out on their own it would be unaffordable to them, but especially true, if someone has a child with a pre-existing condition. So when we pass our bill, never again will people be denied coverage because they have a pre-existing condition. 

“We have to do this in partnership, and I wanted to bring up to date on where we see it from here. The final health care legislation that will soon be passed by Congress will deliver successful reform at the local level.  It will offer paid for investments that will improve health care services and coverage for millions more Americans. It will make significant investments in innovation, prevention, wellness and offer robust support for public health infrastructure.  It will dramatically expand investments into community health centers.  That means a dramatic expansion in the number of patients community health centers can see and ultimately healthier communities.  Our bill will significantly reduce uncompensated care for hospitals. 

“You’ve heard about the controversies within the bill, the process about the bill, one or the other.  But I don’t know if you have heard that it is legislation for the future, not just about health care for America, but about a healthier America, where preventive care is not something that you have to pay a deductible for or out of pocket.  Prevention, prevention, prevention—it’s about diet, not diabetes. It’s going to be very, very exciting. 

“But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy.  Furthermore, we believe that health care reform, again I said at the beginning of my remarks, that we sent the three pillars that the President’s economic stabilization and job creation initiatives were education and innovation—innovation begins in the classroom—clean energy and climate, addressing the climate issues in an innovative way to keep us number one and competitive in the world with the new technology, and the third, first among equals I may say, is health care, health insurance reform.  Health insurance reform is about jobs.  This legislation alone will create 4 million jobs, about 400,000 jobs very soon.
(Yellow highlights added)

Pardon the perhaps excessive amount of context.

It seems beyond question that Pelosi was not making any explicit reference to the principle that the bill must be passed before the details may be known.

That said, the way the bill has been handled by Democrats in Congress gives Pelosi's statement a double meaning that is too tempting to pass up.

Fairness suggests that Pelosi's statement be presented in terms of its original context even when one is exploiting the unintended meaning.