Misleading "misery index" / Facts Freedom Day (4/15)

By Ben Fritz, Bryan Keefer, and Brendan Nyhan

John Kerry's campaign released a new "middle-class misery index" this week specifically designed to compile statistics that make President Bush appear to have performed far worse than the traditional "misery index" used by economists.

The Tax Foundation has released its annual calculation of Tax Freedom Day and, once again, it uses a deceptive average to overstate the amount of taxes paid by typical Americans. (Read the whole column.)

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Related links:
-A real burden on the taxpayers (Brendan Nyhan, 4/17/02)

4/15/2004 02:01:59 AM EST |

Kerry pushes an old myth and a new one (4/15)

By Brendan Nyhan and Bryan Keefer

During a conference call with college reporters Tuesday, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, falsely claimed that three million jobs had been lost under President Bush, saying, "There's a direct choice in this race, and it's a choice between common sense and a failed economic policy that's seen us lose three million jobs."

The most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show, however, that 1.8 million net jobs have been lost since January 2001. Over the same period, 2.6 million net private sector have been lost (the difference is due to increased government employment). Yet Kerry has now misrepresented total job loss twice since the numbers came out. As we previously showed, he told a press conference shortly after the figures were released that, "Obviously all of us are pleased with the job numbers for this month, but there's almost no way this administration will avoid having lost two million jobs."

Earlier this year, Kerry and his campaign engaged in a more subtle form of exaggeration, claiming that three million jobs had been lost during Bush's term and omitting the qualifier that this represented the decline in net private sector jobs at the time (see, for instance, this this March 19 press release).

Kerry's campaign also responded in kind this week to Bush's misleading claims that the Democratic candidate supports an increase in the federal gasoline tax. A Kerry press release Monday stated that "Under George Bush, the gas tax has gone up by $24 billion," implying the figure represents money taken by the government. In fact, that figure is the estimated increase in what consumers will pay for gas over the course of this year. Bush has never proposed such a hike.

At this point, there's one thing that's hard to exaggerate - the number of dishonest claims already being made in this ugly campaign.

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Related links:
-Fictions about Kerry's record on taxes / Distorting Bush comments on outsourcing, jobs record (Ben Fritz, Bryan Keefer and Brendan Nyhan, 4/8/04)
-Spinsanity on John Kerry

4/14/2004 09:00:56 PM EST |

Dowd's unfair NASA-bashing (4/12)

By Brendan Nyhan

In her New York Times column yesterday, Maureen Dowd argues that "we've lost the essence of our frontier spirit" and that "our government [is] reacting to crises with a jaded shrug and lumbering gait." As evidence of this, she points the finger at NASA and the recent destruction of the Columbia space shuttle:

Consider the pathetic performance of NASA, which inverted its motto to "Failure is an option" by shrugging off warnings about the safety of the seven Columbia astronauts who burned up coming back to earth, and not trying to send up a rescue shuttle.

However, Dowd utterly mischaracterizes what went wrong during the Columbia disaster. As William Langewiesche recounted in The Atlantic Monthly last November, the problem was that "it had become a matter of faith within NASA" that the foam used to insulate the shuttle's external fuel tank "could not cause mortal damage” to it. As a result, when low-level NASA engineers raised concerns about the fact that a large piece of foam had broken off and struck the shuttle during liftoff, their efforts were stymied. Higher-level managers did not seriously consider the possibility that the strike would cause the shuttle to burn up during re-entry - as Langewiesche wrote, they "were convinced that they had the situation as they defined it firmly under control."

In context, the line slamming NASA for "not trying to send up a rescue shuttle" is therefore a massive cheap shot, particularly after Dowd's setup about government "reacting to crises with a jaded shrug and limbering gait." Tragically, NASA never considered the foam strike to be a crisis as an organization. As a result, it was never an issue of not "trying" to send a rescue shuttle; managers never recognized that such a mission was necessary. Yet Dowd's phrasing suggests that the organization consciously decided not to attempt a rescue and thereby made failure "an option."

Dowd has frequently put style before accuracy in her writing, including falsely claiming President Bush said Al Qaeda is "not a problem anymore" and citing a meaningless online poll to prove that Americans don't believe the war in Iraq will reduce terrorism. Apparently, cheap shots are also a tool in the repertoire of the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist.

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Related links:
-Spinsanity on Maureen Dowd

4/12/2004 05:13:27 AM EST |

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