Politi-Express Mostly True Review

It was difficult deciding how to classify or tag this post: it’s not a criticism of one of Sublime Bloviations’ Grading PolitiFact (PF) series, so it’s not a Lil White Lie; it’s not really about another PolitiFact Detractor. It’s not about the Politi-Score (although my conclusion takes it into account), but since it is about PolitiFact, it doesn’t really belong under the Sidebar tag. It’s also not Grading PolitiFact Liberal Style, as I’ve noted some Democrat rulings to be lacking. I’ve decided to include it under the PolitiFact Detractor category, as sort of my own PolitiFact Detraction.  It's also being called "Politi-Express" since this one post covers 13 rulings briefly and "expressly" instead of one detailed post for one ruling.

My goal was to look at “numbers” claims to see just how far they off they could be to make the grade as a “Mostly True” ruling. Here I am examining 13 Mostly True rulings of 8 Democrats/Liberals and 5 Republicans/Conservatives done during the first quarter of 2011. What I found was at least two designations or categories of Mostly True judgments. The first one is the one most subject to allegations of selection bias, and the most contentious as to the validity of the ruling--these are claims where the number is essentially correct, and often very close or right on the money, but is used to misrepresent or distort another point.  The second one is fairly straight-up numbers claims where the message or point is more in keeping with the number.

Saved by Zero. NewsMax, a conservative news website, sent out an e-mail in January stating: "The refusal of many federal employees to fly coach costs taxpayers $146 million annually.". PolitiFact ruled Mostly True, although the number was right on, off by “zero.” But their using the word “refusal”  is what pushed it from True to Mostly True.  PolitiFact:

The GAO's methodology doesn't delve into the question of the employee's motives when seeking a premium-class flight, so we think '"refusal" is too strong a word for Newsmax to use when describring how the federal employees reacted to the idea of flying coach.

Besides spelling describing “describring” there can be a number of reasons for not flying coach which would not come under “refusing”: if the travel arrangements were done at the last moment, it could be that first class was all that was available. There are also security considerations, which is why most businesses fly employees “business” class overseas. If the employee is carrying special, crucial equipment which was checked, first class would guarantee the “luggage” would not be lost, since that’s (usually) part of first class service. There may also be time considerations.

PolitiFact was generous (or should I say, charitable) in giving NewsMax a Mostly True on this one. But I also have mixed feelings on a Half True ruling.

Not so fair and balanced. Bill O’Reilly, who calls himself a political Independent, but we all know better, said on his Fox News show in February: "The right-to-work states have much lower level of unemployment than the union states do."

According to PolitiFact:

When we did the math, we found that the unemployment rate in the 22 right-to-work states was 9.17 percent, compared to 9.65 in the 28 non-right-to-work states. (The national unemployment rate that month was 9.4 percent that month -- right in the middle.) So O’Reilly is basically correct…

He said that "right-to-work states have much lower level of unemployment than the union states do." To say it’s "much lower" is a stretch, but he's right that it is lower. On balance, we rate his statement Mostly True.” 

Baloney. Five percent lower unemployment overall on average is not “MUCH” lower unemployment. PolitiFact gave this one away. There can be many other reasons other than "right to work" which may be causing this small variance.  O’Reilly deserved at least a Half True.

You know, there’s also a reason union people call “right to work” states “right to work for less” states. That was not mentioned by PF, either. 

Runaway Train. Lars Larson, just another talk radio conservative pundit in Oregon ("Right on the Left Coast"), said in January that TriMet (a Portland public transportation system) is "spending 4.2 million in fed funds to save $168K per year."

Larson doesn’t appear to understand business investment in research and development can apply to the public sector. (He probably just regurgitates why it’s good for pharmaceutical companies to gouge customers for new drugs for the same reason). Technically True but the underlying message is government waste, by right-wing ideology of anything done by government is done poorly or mismanaged, which isn’t necessarily true. When you consider energy inflation and environmental effects, once the R and D cost is amortized out, this is a “very good thing.”

As the technology of this brake-energy savings system is shared with other transit operations private and public, the costs will come down, and there will be greater savings for all. Back when I was a material cost accountant for one of the Big Three, the initial cost of the airbag module for just the driver’s side steering column was over $300. Auto company executives such as GM’s Roger Smith balked at installing them for the same reason—like energy cost savings, the safety savings didn’t seem to justify it. Marketing didn’t think customers would accept any passed-along cost increases, even for safety features. So companies were forced to absorb this cost, which, using just the $300 per car, was a huge expense for a little “safety.” Good thing those socialist tree-hugging German and Japanese competitors made them standard features.  Today the driver's side steering column airbag costs around $30.

Take these jobs and shove ‘em. Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett (Democrat) says “125 jobs have been already created through Milwaukee Job Corps Center.”  PolitiFact:

According to Roberts, they are all federally funded staff positions at the Job Corps facility itself, everything from instructors and career counselors to cooks and custodians. Nearly all the positions are full-time and most have been filled.

When politicians announce job creations, the public typically thinks of new jobs in the private sector, but that’s not the case here.

In this case, there are 125 taxpayer-funded jobs that have been added to run the Job Corps Center. But the center itself doesn’t create jobs; it trains people for jobs. And it likely will not have trained anyone to be ready for work until late 2011.

A job is a job is a job….plus the multiplier effect. But the impression you get is that the jobs were created by the Center, and they are not the jobs it takes to run the center itself. This can be easily be argued as deserving less than the Mostly True ruling PF gave it. Barrett was being portentous.

Can’t Touch That. Kent Conrad, a Democratic Senator, said: “Social Security, Medicare and Defense are 84 percent of the Federal Budget.” Actually, according to PF those three programs are 54% of the Federal Budget; he said he was talking about what’s not “NDD” (Non-Defense discretionary) which is 16%, so the other 84 percent is for mandatory spending: Social Security, Medicare and Defense, as well as the earned income tax credits, veteran benefits, Medicaid, SSI, food stamps, etc., benefits which citizens have a right to it if they meet certain requirements.

The American people say, don't touch Social Security, don't touch Medicare, don't cut defense," Conrad said. "That's 84 percent of the federal budget. If you can't touch 84 percent of the federal budget -- and, by the way, they also don't want to touch revenue -- you're down to 16 percent of the budget at a time we're borrowing 40 cents of every dollar we spend.

“If you can't touch 84 percent of the federal budget….” is what gets Conrad over the Mostly True hurdle.

But that’s not what PolitiFact said it was checking. The context tells us what Conrad really meant (84% of the federal budget is mandatory spending), and PF should have said THAT was what it was checking.

The following claims were off anywhere from 7 to 15 percent, but  the message being conveyed was not distorted as in the previous criticisms. In other words, they were fairly straight forward numbers quotes. The last two were so close to the number, they may have qualified for a True ruling.

Rickie Don’t Lose that Number. Rick Scott, Republican governor of Florida, stated “I delivered to you a budget that ... cuts taxes by $2 billion."  PolitiFact:

Scott said his budget cuts taxes by $2 billion. But really, the number is about 15 percent high, based on the estimates of his own budget office. We rate this claim Mostly True. 

This is a pretty generic Mostly True. Fifteen percent seems to be the cut-off or "max" for Mostly True.

Ain’t no profit high enough. Democratic Congressman Chris Van Hollen says “healthcare insurance profits have quadrupled.” The number was actually better, but according to PF, it needed to take into account mergers and acquisitions. HC Company profits have gone from $2.41 B in 2001 to $12.87B in 2006. Technically that’s 8.5% above exactly quadrupling.

Mo’ Money. Democratic Congressman Chris Van Hollen also said, in the same quote, that health care insurance premiums doubled between 2000 and 2006. PolitiFact:

We also looked at just the portion of premiums paid by employees, because that's the number most consumers really care about. For individuals, the average premium paid by the employee went from $334 to $627; and for families, the employee contribution went from $1,619 to $2,973. That's an increase of 87 percent and 83 percent, respectively.

So between the off by 13% for the average premium and 17% for the employee contribution, the average “off” is 15%, which qualifies it for Mostly True.

Be (Mostly) True to Your School…Barack Obama was ruled Mostly True for saying: “As many as a quarter of our students are not even finishing high school.” PolitiFact found that the number could be as many as a quarter, so the “as many as” got Obama over the “Mostly True” hurdle.

The Gap. Rachel Maddow (Liberal MSNBC pundit) said in a televised debate with Stephen Moore: “From 1980 to 1990, the top 1 percent saw their income go up by roughly 80 percent" while "the median wage in the country over (the same) 10 years went up 3 percent."

Since she said INCOME for the top 1 percent, when you include capital gains, she is off about 7.5%. On the bottom, the statement to be used is:

To get more precisely at what Maddow cited, Gary Burtless, an economist at the Brookings Institution pointed us to Census Bureau figures for the median annual wage of "workers who are on full-time schedules." These statistics show that the inflation-adjusted median earnings of full-time male workers fell 4.5 percent between 1980 and 1990 (declining from $46,127 to $44,033 ) while the real median earnings of full-time female workers increased 13.6 percent (climbing from $27,750 to $31,535).

Applying a workforce compositon of 60% males, 40% females for that period (a reasonable estimate) puts the overall increase at 2.74%, which is within 9% of her number.

Deep in the Heart of Texas. Wendy Davis, a Texas state senator and Democrat, stated “Texas ranks 44th nationally in education funding per pupil.”

Specifically: “"Under current funding levels, Texas is already near the bottom in education funding per pupil (Texas ranks 44th nationally), " she said.  According to PolitiFact:

All told, it’s clear that rankings vary by year and methodology. Yet Texas has consistently trailed most states in per-pupil education spending. According to the approach cited by the senator, Texas ranked 37th in 2009-10, improving from 44th place the year before. By other measures for recent years, Texas has placed as low as 43rd and, rolling in capital costs, as high as 36th. We rate the senator’s statement Mostly True.

She’s about 9.1% overall for the Mostly True. The underlying argument is how Texas has “trailed most states in per-pupil education spending.”

All Fired Up. The Ohio Democratic Party Twittered this in February: "FACT: the ‘special assistant’ in [John Kasich’s] office makes over three times more than an average #OH firefighter."

PolitiFact says:

Chabria’s annual salary is $145,000 and is not subject to any collective bargaining deal…ODP’s Bringman says the tweet also refers to the average annual salary of an Ohio firefighter of $41,160. He cities the Bureau of Labor Statistics as the tweet’s source….According to one such report in 2010 by Buck Consultants, there are 13,001 full-time fire personnel in Ohio whose collective annual salary totaled $860,966,828. Dividing the total salary by the number of personnel produces an average annual salary of $66,000.

If you average the $41,160, the $45,000 and the $66,000 together as a divisor of $145,000, it’s about 7.36% off of 3.2 times the $145,000, using 3.2 as “more than” 3 times. If I used 3.01, it would be less than one percent.

A case could be made that this should have been ruled True, although it would be a stretch.

Glowing with Facts. Finally, William Kristol, Republican/Conservative editor of Weekly Standard, made this statement:  “Twenty percent of our electricity currently comes from nuclear power plants.”

According to PF:

We first turned to the Statistical Abstract of the United States, a compendium of statistics published by the U.S. Census Bureau. It includes a table summarizing electricity generation by fuel type through 2009. Dividing net electric generation via nuclear power by net generation in the electric power sector as a whole, we get 20.9 percent. That’s close enough to Kristol’s comment to pass muster with us.

He also said there were 104 nuclear power plants when there’s actually 104 nuclear reactors, there are 65 power plants.

He’s off 4.5 percent. This is pretty straight forward and close enough that a case could be made that it should be ruled True.

So how would this affect the Politi-Score? On the Republican/Conservative side, I felt NewsMax and Lars Larson should be downgraded from Mostly True, but wasn’t quite sure how much, so I decided to split the baby and give half the twenty-five point spread between the ruling category (Mostly True to Half True) as a minus of 12.5 to each. In total, however, the result was an equal downgrade between Democrats and Republicans. Extrapolated to the population, the change was less than a point down in the Politi-Score for both sides.

So this exercise for me has not proven a whole lot, except that PolitiFact does have a numerical "range" of values sufficent to justify a ruling of Mostly True on numbers claims...and it does take a good look at the underlying message.