In April 2011, after falsely claiming on the Senate floor that abortion accounts for “well over 90% of what Planned Parenthood does” (it’s more like 3%), Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl explained that his remark “was not intended to be a factual statement.” The ridiculousness of the phrase attracted late-night talk show hosts and exploded on Twitter. Nearly a year later, politicians and pundits continue to make statements that one can only assume are not intended to be factual. Read on for a handful of the latest.
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Mitt Romney takes the cake for the most factually challenged statement of the day. In tonight’s Republican debate on CNN, Romney responded to a question about reining in spending:
I’m a guy who has lived in the world of business. If you don’t balance your budget in business, you go out of business.
The business Mitt Romney was in was private equity. Bain Capital specialized in leveraged buyouts, described by the Wall Street Journal as “acquiring control of businesses by using investors’ money amplified by debt.” Or as Newt Gingrich more colorfully put it, “the Bain model is to go in at a very low price, borrow an immense amount of money, pay Bain a great deal of money and leave.”
If Romney’s “world of business” were a country, it would apparently be one saddled by some serious national debt — and it certainly wouldn’t run a balanced budget. So much for “cap, cut and balance.” Deficit spending: it’s only bad when Democrats do it.
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Harold Meyerson, a liberal columnist for the Washington Post, writes for the opinion section but would apparently prefer the fiction section. He offers legitimate criticism of third-party organization Americans Elect (at best, its candidate will be a Ralph Nader-esque spoiler), but then goes a step too far in attempting to demonize super PACs:
Like super PACs set up to help the candidacies of President Obama and his Republican challengers, Americans Elect is not obligated to report the identity of its funders.
Except super PACs are in fact obligated to report the identity of their funders. How else does Meyerson think the Post tracked down the hedge-fund managers and nutritional-supplement manufacturers who donated to Restore Our Future, the super PAC backing Mitt Romney? Not only are super PACs required to disclose their donors to the FEC, the billionaires who finance groups like Restore Our Future and Endorse Liberty haven’t exactly been shy about their largesse. Foster Friess, the Wyoming investor who gave over $300,000 to the super PAC supporting Rick Santorum, even appeared on MSNBC to promote the candidate and, more notably, promote Bayer aspirin as a contraceptive.
Meyerson’s error seems to stem from the American Prospect article from which his column is adapted. Parts of the op-ed are taken verbatim from the Feb. 9 piece, “Wall Street’s Third Party,” in which Meyerson writes:
[Americans Elect] claimed the status of a 501(c)(4)—primarily a social-welfare organization and thus not obliged to make public the names of its donors and the amounts of their donations. (It’s a status also claimed by the new super PACs, which are the largest spenders in this year’s Republican primaries.)
Again, this is incorrect. Not only must super PACs report their donors, but super PACs are not 501(c)(4) organizations like Americans Elect. Many super PACs are affiliated with non-profit 501(c)(4)s for precisely this reason; donors who value anonymity can give to the 501(c)(4), while limelight seekers like Foster Friess and Sheldon Adelson contribute to the super PAC itself. Karl Rove originated this two-step, establishing American Crossroads (a super PAC) as well as Crossroads GPS (a nonprofit). Meyerson would be advised to bookmark ProPublica’s handy “Guide to the New World of Campaign Finance.” Perhaps the confusion is understandable, given the alphabet soup of the tax code, but the Prospect article has been live for almost a month. It’s hard to believe no one at a major political publication has noticed the error — and even harder to believe that the editors at the Post didn’t catch it either.
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This line from a Wall Street Journal editorial is less a blatant distortion of the truth than a gentle massaging of it. Given that the WSJ usually just makes things up (e.g. “Obama is waging war on religion”), perhaps this is an improvement. Anyway:
Tax revenues soared after the Reagan 1981 tax cuts (the Gipper cut rates across the board by 25%) and the Bush 2003 rate reductions.
Disregarding the first bit about Reagan — I won’t pretend to know or even really care what happened 30 years ago — the second statement is nevertheless dodgy. Liberals regularly brand the notion that the Bush tax cuts raised revenue a conservative myth, and at first glance I too was ready to ding the WSJ for lying. A little digging, however, shows that PolitiFact would probably rate the statement “half-true.” (Though considering PolitiFact’s recent track record, who knows.) The editorial writer is very careful to specify the “2003 rate reductions,” though Bush cut taxes twice: once in 2001 and again in 2003. Why doesn’t the writer include the full package of tax cuts? Well, because the first round of cuts irrefutably reduced revenue. Bruce Bartlett, in a classic post on the New York Times’ Economix blog, offers the following chart from the Congressional Budget Office:
From 2001 to 2003, federal revenues dropped from $1,991 billion to $1,782, or from 19.5% of GDP to 16.2%. How convenient that the Journal chooses to gauge the success of Bush’s tax cuts only by the second round. The editorial is correct in stating that revenues increased after 2003, though as a percentage of GDP — perhaps a better measure, since it is not distorted by inflation and accounts for the fact that a growing economy naturally produces higher tax revenues — federal revenues never surpassed 2001 levels. By this metric, revenues increased, but it’s a stretch to say they “soared.”
The real slipperiness of the WSJ’s claim, however, is that it confuses correlation with causation. Even if tax revenues “soared,” did they soar because of the Bush tax cuts or in spite of them? Between 2003 and 2008, the housing bubble was expanding at light speed. The stock market was booming. Of course revenues were going up. The real question is whether the Bush tax cuts actually caused higher revenues. On that question, Bartlett reports, the CBO answers with a resounding “no.” He writes: “According to a recent C.B.O. report, they reduced revenue by at least $2.9 trillion below what it otherwise would have been between 2001 and 2011.” The cuts also added to the national debt, which the deficit hawks at the Journal also conveniently neglect to mention. In addition to the $2.9 trillion in lost revenue,
Slower-than-expected growth reduced revenue by another $3.5 trillion. Spending was $5.6 trillion higher than the C.B.O. anticipated for a total fiscal turnaround of $12 trillion. That is how a $6 trillion projected surplus turned into a cumulative deficit of $6 trillion.
But hey, who cares about subtle things like accuracy when the central Republican dogma of tax cuts = prosperity is at stake?
. . . So Well Read. . . 