Opinions on Arithmetic Differ: Both Sides Have a Number
Paul Krugman has been outdone by someone else who works for the New York Times
“Opinions on Shape of Earth Differ; Both Sides Have a Point” was exteme but
“In Battle Over Health Law, Math Cuts Both Ways” is the epitome of a nadir.
The key word which Krugman missed is “math”. To Krugman math is a set of artificially constructed theoretical systems in which meanings are more than usually precise and answers often have a right answer and a wrong answer.
For a true journamalist, math is black magic and any claim in math might be true. It is the perfect setting for he said he said.
I do not blame the headline guy. The article by DAVID M. HERSZENHORN is as appalling as the headline. The article contains plainly false claims on matters of fact. One is clear enough that the New York Times must publish a correction.
In this case the debate in which both sides have a point (by the jounamalists definition of debate) is between the CBO and Republicans in congress. Note that the non-partisan CBO is considered one side of the debate. No Democrats in congress are quoted at all. The debate is over the fact that the CBO scores repeal of the affordable care act as adding to the deficit. Notably, according to the rules of the last congress, this verdict is final. Not because the CBO is God (or even Moses) but just because some terms must be defined, the CBO scoring is written into the rules (and will be again as soon as the Republicans are done with their repeal the ACA stunt)
Herszenshon makes no mention of the fact that rejecting the CBO score is generally not allowed. The CBO score becomes just one opinion among many. Unfortunately for Ballance, the argument against the CBO score includes many lies.
Mr Herszenhorn asserts “The Democrats designed the health care law so that most of the cuts and new taxes begin early while most of the spending, on insurance subsidies, for instance, begins in 2014.” I stress this claim is made in his name and in the name of the Times. It is a false claim which must be corrected. The weasle word “most” doesn’t do the trick. It is there because the excise tax starts well after 2014. In fact, the tax increases and spending cuts roughly track the spending increases. The claim in the New York Times is deliberately vague but still false.
A grosser falsehood (in this case a lie) is put in the mouths of un named “Republicans.” “The Republicans also say that the budget rules effectively double-count nearly $400 billion in Medicare savings as both reducing the cost of the health care law and prolonging the life of the Medicare trust fund.” This is false. All of the budget rules discussed in the article are CBO rules which do not estimate the life of the Medicare trust fund. The DBO did not double count. Herszenhorn knows this. That is why instead of writing “the CBO” as in the rest of the article he wrote “the budget rules.” In this case as well he is attempting to mislead the reader. Again he fails. Via Ezra Klein note Paul Ryan admitting that the CBO didn’t double count
By stating a false claim of fact without either noting that it is false or allowing someone honest to contest the claim, Herszenhorn effectively makes the claim his own.
He goes on to do it again “They also complain that the projections omitted $115 billion in spending required to administer the law”! This claim is false. $115 is the forecast discretionary budget of agencies in any way involved with implementing the ACA. It is not an estimate of additional funding which congress is predicted to appropriate because of the bill. In any case, that would require new bills and Republicans don’t have to vote for them. The same post by Klein again
The $115 billion isn’t “implementation” but “discretionary spending.” And most of that spending predates the bill. As CBO Director Doug Elmendorf said, “CBO’s discretionary baseline, which assumes that 2010 appropriations are extended with adjustments for anticipated inflation, already accounts for much of the potential discretionary spending under PPACA.” The exact amount it already accounts for is $86 billion.
One car argue about the predicted additional $29 billion but not about the $86 billion which are just past appropriations of the agencies updated for inflation. The $29 billion forecast almost certainly won’t occur, since Republicans will not vote for them.
The outlay of the article is as bad as the errors of fact. Long befor explaining the CBO estimates Herszenhorn writes the colorful and totally nonsensical
And, for the love of gravity and basic mathematics, how can the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the official scorekeeper charged with keeping count of the nation’s fiscal condition, say that it would cost the government $230 billion over 10 years to repeal a law that would spend $930 billion to extend health insurance to 32 million people?
Evidently in the sub first grade understanding he ascribed to his readers A-B>0. The problem is that many readers will just read the first few paragraphs and most will remember “the love of gravity and basic mathematics” long after they have forgotton the tiny bits of mathematics allowed into the article.
This is mainstream journalism at its worst. If a major party argues somethign based on lies and nonsense, then counteraguments which would show them to be fools and or knaves must be suppressed. Math is totally mysterious. Plainly false claims of fact must not be checked because saying that a claim is false is shrill and unbalanced. Perhaps I overstate my claim. I have seen no evidence that such nonsense is repeated with so much deference if it comes from the Democrats.
There are lies, damn lies and statistics as presented by the MSM.
Is this what is meant by living in a “parallel universe”? Have these people really taken leave of their facculities? HELP!
Yes, for most journalists math is magic. A nice man they meet at a cocktail party pulls a number out of his hat, and the journalist spends the rest of his career saying, “But the rabbit. What about the rabbit?”
Or, as appears to happen, a journalist gets drunk with his journalist buddy who happens to be from the “opposite” side…. but hell, it’s only opinions, right?, and everyone is entitled to his opinion…. but the journalist from the other side tells a convincing story to “our” journalist… convincing to anyone with a few drinks in good company and no need to check the facts or ability to check the arithmetic… and wow! the conventional wisdom grows like the plague.
or, as it happens with your high end non partisan expert, very very careful and accurate mathematics is used, with just a little hand waving, to make “true” statements tell Big Lies. for example a tax raise of forty cents per week can be shown to be “Trillions of Dollars of Unfunded Deficit!” but for some strange reason “Trillions of Dollars of Unfunded Deficit” can never again be shown to be forty cents per week per year per taxpayer.
and you can watch this process play out on Angry Bear. show them the numbers, and they will ignore them because they know in their hearts they have the Real Truth and they never liked math anyway.
an example of the technique of lying while telling the absolute truth that i recall with particular fondness was Andrew Bigg’s demonstration that only 13% of SS recipients depended on SS for their entire income. If you count food stamps as “other” income.
Which might lead the careless reader (the target audience) to assume that SS was not very important.. if you did not add, as Biggs did not add, that over half of SS recipients rely on SS for over half of their income, and 80% of SS recipients would be in official poverty without their SS benefits.
but the Biggest Lie of all is that SS is some kind of welfare that “we” pay, or “the government” pays to “the old.” We are not able to wrap our minds around the fact that “the old” paid for their benefit when they were working, and that this is the ordinary way retirement works, whether it is SS or a stocks and bonds based retirement where the old person cashes out bonds by getting young persons to give him their money.
so maybe it isn’t just math. it’s ordinary careful thinking that can’t survive “the answer you know is true” because you knew it before the world was made.
Math is purely subjective. Religion is the true path to objectivity!
Leroy
as Bertrand Russell said, math is the subject in which we never know what we are talking about or whether what we say is true.
poor Bertrand didn’t know how true that was. it’s not enough to get your arithmetic “correct,” you really have to know what you are multiplying and dividing and why. most folks never do. they learned a few algorithms in school, and as long as they are using them to solve the right problem they do okay and think they are good at numbers. put them in a situation where they never think about what they are doing and talk fast and you can produce the same stupidity that you get with bad religion.
what you get with good religion may be something else entirely. but just for the record, old JC said “judge a tree by it’s fruit.” sounds like a path to objectivity to me.