Lil White Lies: More and Moore

During my working years, I had the unfortunate experience of going through recurring layoffs at my place of employment. Fortunately my salaried position spared me, but it was frightening to me nonetheless. Eventually I tried to take a positive view of them: when the papers would say the workforce was going to be reduced 20%, for example, I’d say to myself, well look at it this way, 80% are still working. This particular ruling by PolitiFact (PF) along with a blog post critical of it, reminds me, in a way, of that “80% positive.”

Michael Moore, self-avowed liberal activist and champion of the working class, recently went to Madison, Wisconsin to cheer on the Wisconsin public union members and teachers who protested their governor’s approach to solving a budget crisis by essentially taking away their collective bargaining rights (along with some other cuts), perhaps a move not so much to alleviate the budget but to eviscerate the unions.

PolitiFact Wisconsin pronounced as "True" the claim of Michael Moore, who stated quite plainly “Today just 400 Americans have the same wealth as half of all Americans combined.” My conservative counter part’s criticism is that Moore was not specific by saying “Today just 400 Americans have the same wealth as half of all Americans combined who are at the bottom of wealth distribution.” Somehow PolitiFact Wisconsin’s writers were at fault for not paying close enough attention to the specific wording of the claim. Not only that, they failed to consider the underlying message of how our country is “awash in wealth”…which, as he supposedly points out, appears to contradict Bill Adair’s claimed method for evaluating statements subject to PolitiFact’s Truth-o-meter.

Let’s first look at the chain of events in relation to this statement. Moore made the statement in Madison on March 5; he published his statement March 7 on his website. PolitiFact Wisconsin did not publish its ruling until March 10.

On March 5, the day of his speech in Madison, we get this description of it from a publication called the Daily Page:

…Moore talked about the nation's growing economic disparities, saying the total amount of wealth held by the nation's 400 richest individuals is equal to the assets of 155 million Americans on the other end of the spectrum.

Apparently this writer knew that Moore meant “the other end of the spectrum” economically when he talked about the 155 million people.

Let’s also take a look at how PolitiFact often clarifies a statement: by contacting the person who said it, or their office, or representative, and asking for the source of their claim.

The front page of Michael Moore’s website now includes a reference to the PolitiFact ruling with a HUGE PolitiFact truth-o-meter with its pointer on TRUE. He now includes an postscript that it’s not 50% but 60%, which links to another page of his website entitled “The Forbes 400 versus Everybody Else” which was published March 7. As noted above, this was before PolitiFact published its ruling on March 10, although we don’t know if Moore edited this page. Here, Moore refers to the 155 million as the “bottom” economically.

Edward Wolff, an economist at New York University, provides the source of Moore’s claim, and Moore adds this quote from Wolff to show it’s even worse than Moore proclaimed:

A somewhat rough update, based on the change in housing and stock prices, shows a marked deterioration in middle-class wealth. According to my estimates, while mean wealth (in 2007 dollars) fell by 17.3 percent between 2007 and 2009 to $443,600, median wealth plunged by an astounding 36.1 percent to $65,400 (about the same level as in 1992!) ... Trends in inequality [from 2007 to mid-2009] ... show a fairly steep rise in wealth inequality ... The share of the top 1 percent advanced from 34.6 to 37.1 percent, that of the top 5 percent from 61.8 to 65 percent, and that of the top quintile from 85 to 87.7 percent, while that of the second quintile fell from 10.9 to 10 percent, that of the middle quintile from 4 to 3.1 percent, and that of the bottom two quintiles from 0.2 to -0.8 percent.

The question might be: Can 155 million Americans combined actually have the same wealth than just the 400 richest? I could envision it as an equation to solve for “X”:

          $1.27T/400 (at top) = $ X / 155,000,000 (at bottom)

If “X” is equal to or less than 1.27T, then Moore’s statement is True. In this case, it computed to $1.22T. (Note when you divide it out, each person at the top has about $3.2 billion in wealth, while each person at the bottom has about $7,000 each.)



A clip of Moore's website with part
 of the Truth-o-meter and his postscript.

 Moore’s underlying argument was more than about the country being “awash in wealth and cash”—it was about wealth disparity, the gap between rich and poor. Because just as I can say “80% are not layed off”, that is a polite way of avoiding the truth, as there is more significance to the variance or distance to that 20%, many of whom will not be able to recoup what they had before. And because the wealthy are clearly becoming wealthier, Moore is taking to the extreme the point of why the Wisconsin government’s proposed solution would be to levy the workers while leaving the wealthy alone (or rewarding them with tax breaks, but that is another issue), who are more in a position to resolve the crisis.

Bryan White ("my conservative counterpart") tries to claim that Moore could be talking about that “80% still working” or the other owners of the remaining $50 Trillion in wealth, by his own “cherry picking” the numbers. It’s obvious, however, Moore is seeing it in a negative light, which as his source economist Wolff shows, is becoming even more negative. The trend of the variance of income inequality is what is crucial here: IT IS the underlying argument. As PolitiFact put it in the ruling “Moore has made other staggering claims about the gap between the nation’s rich and poor.” So we’re talking about the rich and the poor and the gap, not everyone else.

Look at this way: suppose Moore said, "Look, you people, the country is awash in cash.  About 40% of all Americans are doing pretty well compared to the top 400, that 40% own about $50 Trillion of the wealth, while the top 400 only own $1.27 Trillion." It surely would have been a little ridiculous to say it that way to the crowds in Wisconsin, and he would have been booed, even heckled.  Saying it that way is almost a meaningless non-sequitor. It IS true, if that’s the way one wants to look at it…but there’s a fundamental underlying trend being ignored, and Moore wouldn't ignore it, and neither did PolitiFact.