Nick's Place

Nicholas Barnard Economics Journal #6 MWF11-11:50

The airwaves are dominated by political ads. These political ads are a great example of people twisting the figures and data to reflect what they want it to. It very easy to get away distortions of the figures due to the fact that the average voter does not have the time or the desire to research the actual complexities of the issue.

USA Today ran a cover article dissecting the truth of the ads, in their October 26, 2000 edition. There was one very interesting economic comment, related to a tax increase. The ad stated that:

“...every Democrat in Congress that voted for the 1993 budget, voted for quote-unquote 'the largest tax increase in the history of America,” according to their opponents' ads, [Brad] Rourke [of the Project on Campaign Conduct] says. The increase was, in fact, the largest in history in dollar terms, but the tax increase under Ronald Reagan in 1982 was larger as a percentage of the economy.

What is most interesting here is the economic aspect. The anti-democrats chose to look at the tax increase in straight unadjusted dollars. The CPI in 1982 was 90.3 and in 1993 it was 142.61, which is a percentage change of 57.9 percent. To look at the information from a different perspective, I looked at GDP over the same time. The GDP went from 3.2 trillion in 1982 to 6.6 trillion in 1993, for a percentage change of 50 percent. So any general comparison of numbers 1993 and 1982, without adjusting for inflation, would have an error of approximately one-third.

In trying to verify the data involved I went delving at the Internal Revenue Service's website. They relevantly said:

Remember what Mark Twain said about statistics? Well, obviously he hadn't heard about our Tax Stats page. There's a wealth of information about the financial composition of individuals, business taxpayers, tax-exempt organizations and more. This data has been sampled from all kinds of returns and sorted in lots of interesting ways. These facts will amuse some of you. Others will find them worth their weight in gold. And everyone is happy, statistically speaking.

In other words they provided more than enough information for anyone to find the piece they needed to support their argument. I didn't have time to mine the numbers far enough to verify either claim but noticed one interesting fact, that in 1983 the individual income taxes fell 2.9 billion dollars, so even the expert Mr. Rourke, may have twisted his figures to support the paragraph.

In conclusion, the numbers are too complex for a quick analysis; this is why the thirty-second -shorts can be right and wrong at the same time. Political advertising expert Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg center put it best while talking about explaining prescription drug plans, “I defy anyone to do it in less than five minutes.” I doubt the average voter could make sense of any of these arguments in five days of straight study.

One final thing, while we are on the subject of statistics, I took all of my statistics from the government sources. Just in case you feel like checking my figures.