Grading PolitiFact *Liberal*-Style: And The Thieves Just Keep Shouting Robber

Turd Blossom Karl Rove stinks up the television air waves with his PAC’s recent anti-Obama ad:

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Over three years with crushing unemployment. American manufacturing shrinking again. President (Barack) Obama’s plan: Spend more. He’s added $4 billion in debt every day. The economy is slowing but our debt keeps growing. Tell him for real job growth cut the debt.

I had a comment submitted on this blog recently (about my antagonists) which sums this statement up: This is like a child who’s killed his parents asking for the court to give him mercy because he is an orphan.  This is also another case of pot, meet kettle. PolitiFact Florida rated this claim Half True:

Crossroads GPS has its math correct what it says that Obama has "added $4 billion in debt every day." But the ad suggests that Obama is solely to blame. That’s not true, because other factors -- including the struggling economy he inherited and decisions made before he took office -- contributed to that debt. We rate this claim Half True.

PolitiFact Florida’s Amy Sherman bases her conclusion on interviews with “three experts on the federal budget” who are diversified In their political leanings.

Burtless said that most of the debt added under Obama would have happened even if he followed the tax and spending policies in effect when he took office. But Obama embraced policies that increased the public debt -- including signing the stimulus package and agreeing to other measures that held down taxes and increased unemployment benefits.

First, it needs to be said that austerity (cutting debt) will not result in job growth; this is almost an economy 101 axiom, and is being borne out in Europe today. And the empirical evidence of Bush’s tenure shows that cutting taxes does not create jobs either. Even with cuts, taxes must be raised to (try to) balance the budget. And the Republican congress, if it continues in power, and it likely will following the elections, are not going to allow this to happen.

This is not an either/or proposition: debt must be cut and revenue must be raised. For those reasons, for Obama to do what Karl Rove demands is mathematically impossible. It’s even more mathematically impossible in the hazily worded budgets proposed by Mitt Romney.

Nevertheless, PolitiFact puts the onus squarely on presidential policies. The New York Times published this graphical depiction of what makes up the debt due to presidential policies, and Obama got assigned his share:

Click to enlarge:  Even adjusting for "TARP paybacks" Obama's way below $4B per day.

As Jon Perr of Perrspectives so aptly interprets this chart for the Bush side:

Lil White Lies: Christmas in August

Consistency of standards seems to be the real subject of a Grading PolitiFact review of a PolitiFact Texas ruling on former Texas state representative Paul Sadler, who stated that the federal debt (nearly) doubled when Bush was president.

The Sublime Bloviations Grading PolitiFact series gave both writer (Sue Owen) and editor (W. Gardner Selby) of this PolitiFact Texas ruling his usual “F” grade, yet agreed (was “okay with”)  the Mostly True ruling. This was a case where the 500-pound Gorilla Christmas Tree was clearly comprehended, and that it was useless to nitpick about the ornaments.

Before reading this and finding that out, however, I was ready to make another Christmas connection of Sublime Bloviations’ Bryan White with the Republican Two Santa Claus theory as put forth by Jude Wanniski, and how very, very well George W. Bush played that game with his tax cuts. If you look at the chart below, Bush initiated two wars and the unfunded Medicare prescription drug benefit , yet as a percentage of GDP his spending appears relatively flat until the financial meltdown of 2008.

Instead, White belittled the “way” in which the ruling was written, and inserted his own five “concrete examples” of what was wrong with it.

So, let’s take a look at each of his examples, and see if PolitiFact follows any sort of “standards” and if it deviates from them depending on who it is they’re rating.

1) Evidently none of the figures recognize the temporary nature of the debt resulting from the bailout spending in 2009. That bailout spending accounted for very roughly $441 billion as of June 30, 2009.

Right off the bat, there’s been suggestions that bailout repayments may have been recorded differently, while other PolitiFact rulings appear to indicate otherwise. Assuming it to be $600 billion, that’s a little over 10% of Bush’s deficits. Along with the questionable accounting, we’re still at three fourths of that “nearly double.” But the real question is: does PolitiFact take the bailout pay-backs into account in other fact-checks, or do other fact-checkers figure in the bailouts? A lengthy review by FactCheck.Org indicates it does not take the bank bailouts into account (and in this 2010 review as well). PolitiFact rulings about (statements concerning) Bush’s debt by Obama supporters  Rahm Emmanuel and Dick Durbin do not take this into account. A briefly-lived fact-checker sponsored by NBC News called “Meet The Facts” awarded New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez a “Mostly True”  on a "national debt increasing 72% " statement and does not take the bailout paybacks into account.  Onto Number 2 example:

2) Bush gets about $120 billion in ARRA (stimulus) spending credited to his FY2009 account. ARRA spending and bailouts combined may account for nearly $600 billion in supposed debt. The story omits all of this context.

This is basically a repeat of the first point. Factcheck.Org takes into account the stimulus spending and the auto bailout, but does not address the paybacks. Onto Number 3 Example:

3) Following the above, the inauguration date figures probably provide a better estimate of the debt increase than those from the end of the 2001 and 2009 fiscal years: That estimate comes to a 54 percent increase on the gross debt after adjusting for inflation.

Here, PolitiFact (and other fact-checkers) most often use the inauguration date to measure the increase, but they do not account for inflation. In the Rahm Emmanuel fact-check mentioned above:

When Bush took office, the national debt was $5.73 trillion. When he left, it was $10.7 trillion. That's a difference of $4.97 trillion, almost $1 trillion more than what Emanuel said.

In the Dick Durbin fact-check, the end of year 2000 to the end of year 2008 was used, which is almost as good:

U.S. National Debt: The Who, What, When and How

Via an easy-to-understand graph from one of my favorite websites, Bartcop.com

Grading PolitiFact *Liberal*-Style: Deficit Obfuscation

PolitiFact (PF) Ohio starts out this recent ruling with a question: “If you cut out cigarettes and coffee but used the money to pay for a vacation, would you really be saving money?” My answer: yes, especially if you would have had to put the vacation on your credit card if you hadn’t cut out the cigarettes and coffee.  But we are not talking about vacations here.

Republican Representative Jim Jordan was awarded a Mostly True by PolitiFact for an allegation along these lines in an op-ed piece in U.S.A. Today. Specifically, he said:

Politicians are so addicted to spending, they can't even avoid the temptation to spend savings from relatively minor budget cuts. President Obama's recent plan to cut $100 million of waste within his administration won't actually save money because he's going to spend it elsewhere.

What is the “mission” of Obama’s initiative? From his executive order:

The mission of the Initiative is to monitor and promote agency progress in making Government work better, faster, and more efficiently.

The New York Times also pointed out that the “savings” were going to be used elsewhere and not to relieve debt.

On Wednesday, President Obama signed an executive order cutting federal spending on things like promotional plaques and mugs, cellphones and iPads, official travel, and chauffeured cars for senior officials.

“It doesn’t replace the importance of the work that Congress needs to do in coming up with a balanced, bold plan to reduce our deficit,” Mr. Obama said in a ceremony in the Oval Office, “but it indicates once again that there are things we can do right now that will actually deliver better government more efficiently.”

In fact, the administration said, only a small portion of the $4 billion in annual savings will go toward reducing the deficit. Rather, the money will be spent on other programs, like helping veterans re-enter the work force or improving the nation’s infrastructure, which the White House contends are more worthwhile.

I guess the Republicans have two competing party views of the nature of money, especially if you have a Republican who’s both a social and fiscal conservative. Because it’s fungible when it comes to paying for abortion (the social side), but in this case, it’s not fungible when it comes to paying off debt (the fiscal side). To which I say, you can’t have it both ways.

On the abortion side, the fungibility factor is much more convoluted because it mixes public and private. Government funds cannot pay for abortion, but the argument goes  that because some women have the government paying the rest of their medical insurance, they now have the money available to pay for abortion coverage if they want to buy it privately from the insurance company.

Tchotchkes: It's NOT Debt Negotiation

Tchotchkes: On one Issue, There's Bi-Partisanship