Grading ZFC: Bachmann is Full of Care, and BS

In reviewing this meta-factcheck of PolitiFact (PF) by Zebra Fact-Check (ZFC), I carefully listened to the entire 17 minutes of Michele Bachmann's speech at the annual CPAC on YouTube. I must have heard the word "care" between 40 and 60 times in the course of the speech, along with something to the effect of "our movement loves people." It was a pure--in terms of logical fallacies-- "appeal to emotion."

PolitiFact fact-checked the following part of her speech:

We wondered if it was accurate for Bachmann to say that "scientists tell us that we could have a cure in 10 years for Alzheimer's" were it not for "overzealous regulators, excessive taxation and greedy litigators." So we checked with a variety of Alzheimer’s researchers and policy experts. (Bachmann’s office did not respond to an inquiry for this article.)

(I guess if you're excluded from the CPAC Movement of Love you don't deserve a response!)

My conservative counterpart claimed that in analyzing Bachmann's statement, PolitiFact "commit(ted) a core blunder in its fact check analysis." He added that it "fail[ed] to pay basic attention to Bachmann’s statement and severely misrepresent[ed] it in the fact check."

Oh my, do we like to use exaggerative words, like "core blunder" and "severely" misrepresent. So....was that really what it was, or was it something less?

 

Something should be added as far as the context, that ZFC ignores or neglects to mention. Bachmann started out with describing how Jonas Salk invented his Polio vaccine and gave it to Eisenhower in the 1950's which was distributed to the general population. She used it to segue into how a cure could be found in the same way for Alzeimer's. But the two diseases are vastly different: one is a virus, and one is a degenerative, progressive brain disease of unknown origins. It's  comparing apples to oranges. On top of that, if a cure for Alzeimer's is found, does she think whoever discovers it is going to give it so easily to the "people" especially in this day and age of our political parties (and I'm not going to say it's just the Republicans) cow-towing to the lobbyists of major corporations? I'd like to see just how far all that "love and care" is going to go to do it.

But that is besides the point. Was Bachmann's statement misrepresented by PolitiFact in a way so it could ultimately set her pants on fire? A friend of mine who calls himself "Deconverted Man" on YouTube--his real name is Daniel--just finished up on some courses on logical fallacies in completing his degree. He also responds to videos on YouTube with his own where he analyzes, explains, and puts on a "counter" those logical fallacies he finds (and he seems to find a lot). He was gracious enough to review PolitiFact's fact-check as well as what ZFC had to say.

Another Peek at Ponzi

When I first started this blog in 2010, I did a lengthy review of why I thought the social security system was not a Ponzi scheme.

 

It may boil down to an historical argument: that is, which came first, paygo or Ponzi, as well as, from whence did Charles Ponzi get his idea to begin with? I did not cover that part of it at the time, but since then I have come across some new information, and I felt an update was needed.

The history of pensions, particularly public sector pensions, cannot be easily separated from the history of pension finance. The creation of a pension plan coincides with the simultaneous creation of pension liabilities, and the parameters of the plan establish the size and the timing of those liabilities. U.S. Army pensions have always been funded on a "pay-as-you-go" basis from the general revenues of the U.S. Treasury. Thus army pensions have always been simply one more liability of the federal government.

In the United States, pensions have been around since the civil war; in fact, from a world-wide historical perspective, they go all the way back to the Romans, where they started in terms of funding out of the "general treasury"--in other words, they were pay-go from the start. The Ponzi scheme came along in response to Charles Ponzi who glorified it in the 1920's, and he got his idea for his scheme not from working for a pension system, but from a bank:  

In 1907, Ponzi moved to Montreal and became an assistant teller in the newly opened Banco Zarossi, a bank started by Luigi "Louis" Zarossi to service the influx of Italian immigrants arriving in the city. Zarossi paid 6% interest on bank deposits – double the going rate at the time – and was growing rapidly as a result. Ponzi eventually rose to bank manager. However, he found out that the bank was in serious financial trouble because of bad real estate loans, and that Zarossi was funding the interest payments not through profit on investments, but by using money deposited in newly opened accounts. The bank eventually failed and Zarossi fled to Mexico with a large portion of the bank's money.

It may be okay to refer to social security as a Ponzi in the same way many refer to the stock market as a casino; a pejorative: defined as "having a disparaging, belittling or derogatory effect or force." Certainly a Ponzi scheme, being an illegal swindle, is a negative, disparaging way to describe the part of social security that works as "pay-go." Or the stock market "casino", with even television announcers and internet articles regularly referring to investments as "bets." But we know realistically that the stock market is not a casino as much as we know that social security is not a Ponzi scheme. They just seem that way because certain aspects mimic fraudulent activities  (as we might even call insurance a "protection racket").

And of course, Ponzi can be re-applied as a pejorative in the same way towards those things "celebrated" by the right to those things "celebrated" by the left, such as climate change. Things go better with tu quoque?

Confounded by Contextual Complications

It is our policy to make on-the-record email correspondence public where the content affects the context of a story.

Zebra Fact-check, January 7, 2013

 

Fact checkers should emphasize such contextual elements, not bury them.

Sublime Bloviations "Grading PolitiFact", August, 2012

 

(For the second damn time, practice what you preach!)

 

 

Right wingers feel vindicated that Fiat/Chrysler has announced it will be building Jeeps in China, especially at those websites critical of PolitiFact. Instead of beating the same dead horse again and again, I'm going to take another look at this in the terms of the right-wing argument: that if any (even a very small) percentage of production at the Jeep plants in the United States is replaced by production in China, then Mr. Romney's statement (see above graphic) is true in all respects, and needs no further explanation.

 

The right-wing website Zebra Factcheck (ZFC) uses the word "context" in almost every one of its "fact-checks." It seems to feel that it's so important that  they even have a tile symbol for it. For example, in one of its more recent posts on Marco Rubio, it claims that " In effect, PolitiFact takes Rubio’s tweet out of context."

Zebra Factcheck's littered graphics has a white tile symbol for "Out of Context"

 On his review of Romney's "Jeeps to China" comment, anti-PolitiFact website(s) PolitiFact Bias and Zebra Factcheck writer Bryan White duly notes the "context" he feels is crucially important to Romney's claims.

That’s right. PolitiFact takes a preferred Obama campaign claim about its rescue of the auto industry and states it matter-of-factly in a fact check of Romney. No additional context needed, apparently.

The media treatment of the dispute between the campaigns misses the context while focusing on the particulars. Romney is not simply making statements about Obama’s role in the auto bailout. His campaign is answering the Obama campaign’s messaging and pointing out missing parts of its story.

The only context I can see that was missed (according to Zebra Factcheck) appears to be what was presented by one of Romney's spokespeople to the New York Times in response to Romney's ad:

The facts are clear: despite his false and misleading attacks, President Obama took the auto companies into bankruptcy,” said a spokeswoman, Amanda Henneberg. “His mismanagement of the process has exposed taxpayers to a $25 billion loss.”

Romney had proposed "letting Detroit go bankrupt" in opposition to what President George Bush decided to initiate with a bridge loan to GM and Chrysler in 2008. He said the government "should provide guarantees for post-bankruptcy financing." But even Michigan's future (Republican) Governor Rick Snyder and (Republican) Congressman Fred Upton, acknowledged that "there was no one that could have picked up those pieces other than the federal government." The respected, not really liberal Economist had this to say:

Grading ZFC: More Republican Math!

PolitiFact Bias (PFB) writer Bryan White, via his conservatively skewed website Zebra Factcheck (ZFC), has committed a very similar error it pointed out in a recent PolitiFact Georgia fact-check on Cato Institute's Michael Cannon's statement concerning Obamacare "exchanges" being outlawed in Georgia. And I have to admit they both had a point: Cannon was talking about Obamacare exchanges in Georgia and in context he said--right at the beginning--that "by default" the feds would do their own exchanges in response. PolitiFact seemed to ignore this part of Cannon's claim and conflated it into something that should not have been called false. Yes, score one for PFB and Michael Cannon.

 

The error in this case is one which ZFC's writer Bryan White might call, if I had done the same thing, a logical "Red herring" or "Straw man." He does this in his fact-check of a statement by the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC)--that "Across the board tax rate cuts are regressive because a 20 percent tax cut for a millionaire – even as a share of income – amounts to a far greater benefit than a 20 percent cut for a hardworking low income American.” Instead of examining the premise of the statement he goes into a multifaceted dissertation on "effective tax rates" complete with pretty graphs, on how the overall rates were truly progressive up until seven years ago, and why poor Mitt Romney pays a lot more than Joe the Plumber.

 

He did not even try to actually calculate in numerical terms  whether there was a disproportional benefit to the rich of the across the board tax cut in and of itself. He even had something in his fact-check on how to "get there", quoting the IRS: “A tax that takes a larger percentage of income from low-income groups than from high-income groups.” So I will "get there", using two hypothetical progressive tax rates very close to what we have today, utilizing the 20% across the board factor.

 

Click to enlarge:  The 3rd thru 7th columns only needed formulas.

In the example above, we are using a 10% rate for a person with taxable income of $25,000 and a 25% rate for someone with income of $250,000, the current taxes paid using those rates, then re-calculated for a uniform across the board tax rate reduction of 20 percent. All other factors--excise taxes, corporate taxes--would be ignored because we are only concerned with the income tax cut itself and its effect on after-tax income (as that is the premise of the CPC statement). As shown in the last, highlighted bright yellow column, as a percent of after-tax income, the $250K earner has three times the additional income than that of the $25K earner. Now, you might say that it's because of the difference in tax rates, but even if you factor that in, the $250K earner still has 20% more after-tax income. THAT is the "far greater benefit" the CPC is talking about. The (yes, liberal) Center for Budget and Policy Priorities explains this "concept" as well in a website article. They chart the "regression" by income category.

Giving ZFC a KO on CKDs

This first check of Zebra Fact-Check (ZFC) is also a postscript on something just posted as a response to PolitiFact Bias--on the misleading information in a late Mitt Romney campaign ad being used to rile autoworkers in Ohio.

ZFC writer Bryan White offers us this "these-are-jobs-in-China-from-the-U.S." citation from the Toledo Blade to back up the veracity of Romney's literal statement that Fiat/Chrysler is going to build Jeeps in China.

Jeep currently exports U.S.-made vehicles to China, which is Jeep’s largest market outside of North America. Last year, Jeep sold 22,294 vehicles in China. The company is expected to exceed that this year.

He then asks "If a Chinese Jeep plant takes over production of some or all of the more than 20,000 vehicles Jeeps sells in China then how does this not affect workers in the United States?"

Let's first start with the 22,294 vehicles from a relative perspective. One Detroit Jeep plant produces about 950 vehicles per day in 2 shifts. That means if the plant was working a normal 5-day work week, this would be roughly one month's production. Not very much, less than 10% of total annual production, and would be even less if the plant was at maximum production (3 shifts) or was working overtime. The Chinese production is what is called low volume. Even the 33,463 vehicles cited from the Business Standard fit the same definition: not enough for full production, not enough for a plant.

ZFC might counter that this could still be 10 percent of the workers being replaced....but that's not quite so black and white. If ZFC had been thorough in its fact-checking like it claims it is, it should have noted the paragraph at the bottom of the Toledo Blade article:

That commitment means Chrysler will not fully build and assemble Wranglers outside America. The automaker does currently ship low volumes of what the industry calls “knock-down kits” for final assembly in Egypt. Mr. Bragman said that's fairly common in the automotive industry, and the kits are not equitable to full-scale production plants. Parts would still have to be made and partially assembled elsewhere.

Knock-down kits (CKD = Complete Knock Down) contain "the parts needed to assemble a product" and are used when there is a low volume for export as "a method of supplying parts to a market, particularly in shipping to foreign nations, and serves as a way of counting or pricing." That is how Jeeps were produced in China up until 2009. The kits are assembled in the United States...and guess who does the assembly of the parts in those kits here for shipment to China? Now, if ZFC or counterirritant want to call Chrysler to find out if fewer workers are needed for CKD kit assembly than for full-scale assembly, they're more than welcome to find out. And, it is possible the kit assembly could be outsourced to a local supplier--but then, additional jobs would be created there to replace any auto plant jobs. 

So when Aaron Bragman, a senior automotive analyst at IHS Automotive, was quoted to say that the Chinese production "doesn't take any jobs away from anyone else" he was correct. Romney is not correct, and neither is ZFC nor counterirritant.

Finally, the original Bloomberg article said that Fiat was in "detailed conversations" about making Jeeps in China. It wasn't definite nor confirmed. So, what happens if the deal with Guangzhou Automobile Group doesn't materialize? I didn't mention this in my original criticism, but it is another large gray area on the Zebra. Because while Romney himself said the Italians ( I could do another post on that one as well) were "thinking" of moving the production to China, the ad (which was aired much more) said it was a sure thing...which it wasn't. That alone makes Romney's literal statement false.

But what else would one expect from right-wing fact-checkers.

Lil White Lies: Read It and Jeep

PolitiFact Bias (PFB) gleefully joins with the anti-PolitiFact blog counterirritant in misrepresenting a blatant misrepresentation by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney as we enter the last 100 hours of the 2012 presidential campaign.

PolitiFact awarded a Pants on Fire (and WaPo FactChecker and Factcheck.org agree in line with it) when the Romney campaign released an ad which said:

Who will do more for the auto industry? Not Barack Obama. Fact checkers confirm that his attacks on Mitt Romney are false. The truth? Mitt Romney has a plan to help the auto industry. He is supported by Lee Iacocca and the Detroit News. Obama took GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy and sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China. Mitt Romney will fight for every American job.

It basically was "piggy-backed" (Glenn Kessler's words) from a very similar statement Romney had made during an Ohio campaign stop: " “I saw a story today that one of the great manufacturers in this state, Jeep, now owned by the Italians, is thinking of moving all production to China. I will fight for every good job in America."

 

That's pretty much everything....so PFB and counterirritant decide that "building Jeeps in China" is technically true as parsed waaaaaaaay out of context, and the fact-checkers need to fact-check more, as the loud and clear, self-evident implication isn't enough. They need to actually verify that the Chinese production is replacing (at least some of) the American production. Counterirritant thinks he knows the fact of the matter, and he condescendingly tells us: "For those slow on the uptake: Jeep vehicles that will be produced in China by Chinese workers are currently produced in the U.S by U.S. workers."

 

Nope, not quite. Because when Chrysler or Fiat talk about this Chinese production, it's added production, not replacement. Chrysler built Jeeps in China--for the Chinese market--before Fiat acquired it in 2009. And Romney's fearmongering came on the heels of this report from the Detroit Free Press:

In fact, Chrysler is investing $500 million at its Toledo North Assembly Plant and plans to add 1,105 new workers by the third quarter of 2013 to build an all-new SUV that will replace the Jeep Liberty.

Production of the new SUV will begin next summer and the hiring process for the new workers, who are scheduled to start by the next fall, has begun, said Chrysler spokeswoman Jodi Tinson.

In other words, as noted succinctly by the New York Times: "Jeep is discussing increasing production in China for sales within China; it is not moving jobs out of Ohio or the United States, or building cars in China for export to the United States."

Lil White Lies Extra: One Context for You, TWO for Me

Fact checkers should emphasize such contextual elements, not bury them.
-- Sublime Bloviations/PolitiFact Bias

And fact-checkers of fact-checkers should bring out those elements as well. Of course, if you're a biased fact-checker like PolitiFact Bias' Bryan White, you'd do it for the side you ideologically prefer and not the other. Here's a most excellent example.

 

In a recent review of a hotly-contested-by-the-right PolitiFact ruling on a statement by Paul Ryan that Obama promised to keep a GM Plant in his Wisconsin home district open, White formatted in bold the last words of Obama's speech "that's the future I'll fight for as your president" to prove it was a "pledge" as compared to Ryan's word "promise." He then said:

Importantly, Obama opened his speech with references to the plant. He then sketched his vision of America before mentioning how the Janesville plant could stay open if the government provides support. In that context, Obama pledged to provide that support. Does Mr. Obama use the specific term "promise" in his statement? No, certainly not. Does he guarantee the plant will remain open? Again, no. However, there is little doubt that every person in Janesville listening to his speech took it as a pledge from the president to work to enact policies to keep the plant open. Mr. Obama did, in fact, pledge to do just that.

Here's the complete context that preceded Obama's statement at the Janesville Plant in February, 2008, that was available on the internet, but White decided to "bury":

I believe that we can create millions of those jobs around a clean, renewable energy future. A few hours northeast of here is the city of Manitowoc [MAN-a-ta-WOC]. For over a century, it was the home of Mirro manufacturing – a company that provided thousands of jobs and plenty of business. In 2003, Mirro closed its doors for good after losing thousands of jobs to Mexico.

But in the last few years, something extraordinary has happened. Thanks to the leadership of Governor Doyle and Mayor Kevin Crawford, Manitowoc has re-trained its workers and attracted new businesses and new jobs. Orion Energy Systems works with companies to reduce their electricity use and carbon emissions. And Tower Tech is now making wind turbines that are being sold all over the world. Hundreds of people have found new work, and unemployment has been cut in half.

So Obama was talking about how a "sweeping energy policy could give the town the resources to produce something else." Since the plant was still producing (the biggest gas-guzzling) vehicles at the time, with the future unknown, this naturally follows and makes the most sense.

Lil White Lies: Closing Arguments

His position also contradicts the Republicans’ position of opposing President Obama’s auto rescue.  --Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon

Another politi-flubbed Politi-Flub post from Sublime Bloviations concerns the fact-checking of Paul Ryan’s statement about the Janesville, Wisconsin GM Plant relating to (prior to) his acceptance speech before the RNC in Tampa, Florida. Even though other fact-checkers have weighed in with similar conclusions (except for certain PolitiFact detractors ), writer Bryan White says “PolitiFact has earned its status as the least-dependable of the stable of left-leaning fact check organizations.” He makes his case starting with his interpretation of a speech that Obama made in February, 2008 at the Janesville plant itself. He writes that it means there was, in fact, “a pledge from the president to work to enact policies to keep the plant open.” Here’s the key excerpt from Obama: 

And I believe that if our government is there to support you, and give you the assistance you need to re-tool and make this transition, that this plant will be here for another hundred years. The question is not whether a clean energy economy is in our future, it’s where it will thrive. I want it to thrive right here in the United States of America; right here in Wisconsin; and that’s the future I’ll fight for as your President.

It should also be noted, and I display a screen-snip at the bottom of this post just in case he fixes it and denies he did it, that the speech was not made by President-elect Obama in December 2008, but by then Senator Obama on February 13, 2008. A Sublimely Bloviating -Flub, perhaps to give an appearance that Obama made these remarks with the knowledge of the plant closing. But to continue, if White had looked at the previous two paragraphs of Obama’s statement, he would find that in context, Obama wasn’t talking about “policies to keep the plant open."  Not just because the closure wasn't even announced until several months later.  He was talking about how energy policy could produce new jobs, best described in an article by Whet Mozer in Chicago Magazine:

In context, Obama wasn't speaking so much about the auto bailout (which was just gearing up) as the idea that clean-energy investment could allow Janesville to remake its industrial sector, as made clear by the two previous paragraphs:

"I believe that we can create millions of those jobs around a clean, renewable energy future. A few hours northeast of here is the city of Manitowoc [MAN-a-ta-WOC]. For over a century, it was the home of Mirro manufacturing – a company that provided thousands of jobs and plenty of business. In 2003, Mirro closed its doors for good after losing thousands of jobs to Mexico.

But in the last few years, something extraordinary has happened. Thanks to the leadership of Governor Doyle and Mayor Kevin Crawford, Manitowoc has re-trained its workers and attracted new businesses and new jobs. Orion Energy Systems works with companies to reduce their electricity use and carbon emissions. And Tower Tech is now making wind turbines that are being sold all over the world. Hundreds of people have found new work, and unemployment has been cut in half."

It wasn't a promise to keep the factory making cars; it was an expressed belief that a sweeping energy policy could give the town the resources to produce something else, like passenger rail cars.

This fits with the fact the plant was still operating at the time Obama was there.  Unless Obama knew the plant was going to close, what's the purpose of promising to keep it open?  So White could only expect PolitiFact Wisconsin to “locate such a pledge” given his construed-without-context, untimely,  biased interpretation.     Which means they wouldn’t find it, since there's no such thing.  

Next up, and in more heated discussion, there’s the question of “when is the plant closed”? If you read Politifact’s ruling, it’s very important to note that Kertscher wrote that the plant was effectively shut down on December 23, 2008, in the planning for many months.  The conservative crowd, of course, says Janesville didn’t shut down in December of 2008, but in April of 2009, when Obama was president. Basically it ceased regular production (see photo above). In the ensuing few months, it had 57 workers completing a contract order from Isuzu for a vehicle called the NPR W series . The conservative websites say it was still producing (what’s termed at GM “medium duty”) “trucks” but they were actually commercial forward cabs, produced at a miniscule rate compared to the regular production (44 jobs per hour versus 2). Nevertheless, in December 2008, the plant was largely idled except for the special order for Isuzu; and it has been on “standby” ever since as again described by Whet Mozer of Chicago Magazine:

Lil White Lies: Return to Sender

It gets a little tiresome seeing “Grading” PolitiFact (PF) repeatedly engage in partial reporting on its reviews of PolitiFact. Or I should say, it accuses them of doing the same thing it does, the reason I’m starting this review with its very words.

In this ruling Obama campaign spokesperson Stephanie Cutter said that Paul Ryan’s Medicare Plan included the same cuts as the ones Obama is making. PolitiFact’s Angie Drobnic Holan writes that she is rating Cutter on "whether Cutter is correct that Ryan relies on those same reductions in his budget."

She finds her claim True because in an interview with George Stephanopoulos Ryan agrees: "Well, our budget keeps that money for Medicare to extend its solvency. What Obamacare does is it takes that money from Medicare to spend on Obamacare. ..." So Grading PolitiFact concludes:

Sorry, but that's not a fact check and it's very misleading. PolitiFact is seizing on an ambiguity from Ryan and insisting that it perfectly dovetails with Cutter's claim. A real fact check would verify from the text of Ryan's budget that the savings have the same origin as those projected by the CBO for the health care reform law. This fact check doesn't do that at all. Ryan's budget is neither listed among the sources on the sidebar nor linked in the text of the story.

First off, there’s a lot of other sources confirming Cutter’s remarks indirectly, such as the New York Times:  (emphasis mine)

Mitt Romney’s promise to restore $716 billion that he says President Obama “robbed” from Medicare has some health care experts puzzled, and not just because his running mate, Representative Paul D. Ryan, included the same savings in his House budgets.

Or, FactCheck.Org: (emphasis mine)

The Romney campaign told us that the “Romney-Ryan plan” is Ryan’s latest Medicare plan, except it would not include any of those $716 billion cuts that were in the Affordable Care Act. Ryan’s plan did include the majority of those cuts, and overall, Ryan estimated his plan would lead to greater Medicare cuts/savings than the president’s.

Or ABC News, which stated its information on the Ryan-Obamacare cuts came from the Kaiser Family Foundation: (emphasis mine)

Voters might be left with the impression that Romney and Ryan have both opposed the cuts. The truth is that Ryan himself endorses them in his signature budget plan – the same plan Romney has said he would sign as president if it reached his desk.

Those Medicare savings -achieved through reduced provider reimbursements and curbed waste, fraud and abuse, not benefit cuts – appear in the House Republicans’ FY 2013 budget, which Ryan authored.

His plan would in part repeal the entirety of the Affordable Care Act — except the reductions in Medicare spending now at the center of debate, according to analysts with the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation.

Or NBC News, linked in the ruling’s source list:  (emphasis mine)

The Affordable Care Act – Obamacare – does cut the growth of Medicare by $700 billion over 10 years. But benefits to seniors actually increase under Obamacare, which reduces payments to providers in exchange for more people covered by insurance. What’s more, the Ryan plan – approved by the House – cuts Medicare spending every bit as much as Obamacare does. In fact, it incorporates the very same budget projections, even as it repeals Obamacare. That’s what you call having it both ways.

Faced with questions about Ryan's support for these cuts, the Romney campaign clarified its position Monday evening and disagreed with those cuts.

White cites an article by Dave Weigel of Slate, which he says belies PolitiFact’s argument as to how the "cuts" are to be achieved:

Lil White (Un)Lies: Ineffective Tax Rates Part 2

Actually this could be called Part Three of a Lil White Lies post on a Sublime Bloviations/PolitiFact Bias cross-post of two critiques, on the way PolitiFact makes use of “effective tax rates” in its rulings. The first part, however, had to do with one fact-check to another, so I made that a separate post. Both of these have to deal with those effective tax rates.

Author Bryan White claims that PolitiFact has shown a “persistent pattern of ignoring and/or minimizing data on effective federal tax rates, including a study by the otherwise esteemed Congressional Budget Office.” So, do they? Well, it depends.

Carried Away with Carried Interest. Let's first take a look at the payroll tax, where one half is paid by the employee and the other is paid by the employer, for herein lies the "rub." For effective tax rate purposes, the half paid by the employer is usually shown as part of the employee’s tax burden, because supposedly their income would be increased if they did not have this tax. I realize there’s currently a payroll tax holiday of 2 percent, but we know that’s going to have to end sooner or later. The total tax for Social Security and Medicare is 15.3 percent, and that is taxed on all income from the get-go. The carried interest rate is the capital gains rate of 15 percent on taxable income—that’s income after deductions. So it could be said that if you’re not an investor, you’re saddled with pay roll taxes at a slightly higher rate than the carried interest. But there’s more-- the carried interest person is “done” at this point—they owe no more. You still have to pay federal income taxes. That’s why Warren Buffett calls payroll taxes "heavy."

So with that in mind, when Buffett talked about his secretary and Sherrod Brown talked about sheet metal workers and teachers in Cleveland (although I have a few misgivings about that one, explained below), they were comparing capital gains/carried interest tax rates versus middle class straight compensation tax rates. For the middle class (in 2011) it’s 10 percent up to $8,500, 15 percent up to 34,500, then 25 percent (single--double that for married filing joint). When it gets to the top rate of 35 percent it’s not “middle class” anymore. But compare that 25 percent to the 15 percent flat rate for capital gains and carried interest, and then think about the payroll taxes already paid. It should be obvious the investors pay far less in income taxes.

Where a statement used “hedge fund managers” or implied carried interest/capital gains (as Buffett did when he said “investors”) PolitiFact writers seemed to keep that in mind, awarding Buffett and Sherrod a “True.”

Historically Taxing.  White’s beloved overall effective tax rate which includes corporate tax rates was used in comparing taxes paid historically, as in two rulings about rates in the 1950’s compared to now, from Obama and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. It was also used (the CBO reports to which he refers) in a ruling on a statement by Timothy Geitner. He was ruled Half True because his statement was a combined one: he said “For people in the top 1% of income, ‘your effective tax burden is in the low 20's, the lowest it's been in decades’ (effective tax rates = True) ...’lower than somebody who might make substantially less money’ “ (effective tax rates = False, because he’s NOT talking about carried interest/capital gains).

Click to enlarge:  This graph from the Piketty/Saez tax rate report shows how rates have changed at the top over the years.

Call Me Maybe. When the context of the statement isn’t clear—where it may be referring to investors as well as those compensated ( both types in one income group), PolitiFact generally equivocates to Half True. Obama’s statement about Mitt Romney's 14% tax rate being lower than most other Americans , or when he stated that a construction worker who made $50,000 shouldn’t pay a higher tax rate than someone making $50 million a year, were both rated Half True. However, in a similar comment made a few days before the one about the construction worker, Obama said “somebody who's making $50 million a year in the financial markets should be paying 15 percent on their taxes when a teacher making $50,000 a year is paying a higher rate” which is clearly about carried interest/capital gains, and probably would have garnered Obama a higher ruling. But Obama was not that specific in the statement PolitiFact decided to rate.

Lil White Lies: Ineffective Tax Rates Part 1

Trying to determine a link gone bad at PolitiFact, I came across an interesting article in defense of Mitt Romney’s 13.9% tax rate from the Tax Foundation, one of PolitiFact’s oft-used sources. An article by William McBride is headlined “At least 90 Percent of Americans Have a Lower Income Tax Rate than Romney” complete with a large pie chart depicting by slice the range of rates Americans pay. Between this and another article disputing it from a website called “Just Facts” it would seem PolitiFact might rethink its position on a ruling of “Half True” for Obama stating that most people pay more taxes than Mitt Romney.

But there’s a lot of argument about what rate is being talked about, because it would appear that the Tax Foundation article concerns itself with federal income taxes only. And for that part, PolitiFact’s ruling was in agreement. However, it wasn’t in agreement when the payroll taxes were included. An article at Factcheck.org essentially said the same thing: “it depends.”

My conservative counterpart (in two posts) argues that if payroll taxes are included, so should corporate and excise taxes, as part of an overall effective rate. The corporate tax rate appears to be something, however, that all the fact-checkers seem to avoid, for a lot of good reasons. As noted in one PolitiFact tax-related ruling:

The burden for some taxes, including corporate taxes, excise taxes and estate taxes, are hard to attribute to individual returns, so we’ll set those aside. But one federal tax is straightforward to throw into our calculations: payroll taxes.

And since the fact-check is on Romney’s individual return, corporate taxes were not included. It’s not a direct, out of pocket tax like the payroll tax. It’s what’s known as an “imputed” tax, and it’s very difficult to measure:

We will assume that the corporate income tax falls entirely on capital income and that all financial assets (and not only corporate stock) bear the tax equally. Auerbach (2006) summarizes the literature on the incidence of the corporate income tax and points out that there is still considerable uncertainty on the question because of the inherent difficulty in measuring empirically the economy-wide incidence of the corporate tax.

“Just Facts” (which I like to call “Just Cherry-Picked Facts” because they appear to be only about “facts” right-wingers love) insists that the corporate tax be “incorporated” into Romney’s effective income tax rate, but proposes three scenarios in how it might be computed, resulting in an “effective rate” of anywhere from 18 to 26 percent. In other words, it’s not very accurate, because we don’t know how to apply it.

Not only that, they may have determined the rate based on too much of Romney’s income.  According to an article in Daily Finance on Romney:  (emphasis mine)

Lil White Lies: Panic A Tax

Say we were three ambitious little kids who agree to contribute one third of our lemonade stand take to start the Big Lemonade Corporation. I had a really great traffic spot and made $900, but each of my buddies collected $300 each. So we had $500 total from the one third rate of contribution , $300 from me and $100 from each of my buddies. Of that $500, 60 percent was from me ($300) and theirs was 20 percent each ($100)…. In other words, I paid the same rate (one third) but it was a greater share (60%).

I don’t know how else to more simply explain this recent complaint at a cross-posted item at PolitiFact Bias and Sublime Bloviations, comparing a statement by Obama about tax rates with a statement last year by Michele Bachmann about tax share (as well as an insistence that PolitiFact is bound to use the "effective tax rate" he prefers).

Instead of reaching back to 2011 for apples to oranges, he needed only go to a recent PolitiFact Ohio ruling in March of Republican congressional candidate Jim Renacci, a ruling he may have dismissed since PolitiFact judged it to be True. Renacci said "The top 1 percent (of income earners) paid 36.7 percent (of the taxes). ... The top 50 percent pay 97.7 percent." We also need to put this in proper context, because he was talking about income taxes: as noted by the PolitiFact ruling “he was attempting to shoot down ‘a misconception on wage earners and income taxes paid,’ citing the percentage of the nation’s taxes paid in 2009 based on income levels.”

Previous to Renacci’s statement, PolitiFact had found four statements of the same order—income tax share—all True by Republicans Ron Cornilles, a congressional candidate, Texas Senator John Cornyn, Virginia congressman Eric Cantor and Georgia congressman Tom Graves.  Why didn't PolitFact Bias' Bryan White cite one of these (even though it was still apples to oranges)?  Perhaps because, Bachmann was found False, or as stated in the Cornyn ruling "...scoring points on tax policy depends on how you frame the issue."

And  Bachmann framed it incorrectly.  She was asked in an interview “shouldn’t the tax burden be equally shared.” To which she responded similarly to the others, only she (very clearly) said all taxes, not just income taxes, as was used in the rulings above.  Her ruling cross-referenced a claim made in 2009 by Nancy Pelosi—found False by PolitiFact-- that Bush's tax cuts for high earners "have been the biggest contributor to the budget deficit."

This seems to be the difference between Republicans and Democrats when it comes to debating our tax policy: Republicans stress share while Democrats stress rates. By the way, Democrat Debbie Wasserman-Schultz was called out False by PolitiFact for telling Wolf Blitzer on CNN that what he may have heard from one of these congressmen about the income tax share wasn’t true .

As far as White's complaint about "effective tax rates" ("that messy corporate and excise tax stuff") an extensive review of statements by Democrats on this topic as graded by PolitiFact did reveal some  incongruities and it's going to take another post all its own to reconcile them all, if that can be done. So while I'll say he may have a point, I won't be getting into it until later.

White needs to find a PolitiFact statement by a Republican on rate of taxation used in a similar context, particularly one rated “worse” for a Republican, where rates are compared between high and low income earners, or on an historical basis, not the share of taxes paid. The ruling evidence indicates that on income tax share, Republicans tend to emphasize that lower income earners don’t contribute a lot, which has been consistently rated True by PolitiFact.  Comparing the Obama ruling to  the one he chose of Bachmann didn't prove anything.

And don’t call PolitiFact overwhelmingly hypocritical when a decent apples-to-apples example of how PolitiFact rates Republicans differently than Democrats can’t be cited. Yes, PolitiFact is not perfectly consistent (and neither is White, obviously!), but it doesn’t prove any liberal bias.

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:

Lil White Lies: Double Bain Dead

A post at Sublime Bloviations says this PolitiFact fact-check is ”a joke” and not relevant, and its "inflammatory" partner anti-factchecker blog counterirritant chimes along, adding Limbaugh “didn’t try to make [the] argument” to support PolitiFact’s ruling of Pants on Fire.

Let’s start by taking a look at what Limbaugh initially said, from the PolitiFact ruling:

"This evil villain in the new Batman movie is named Bane. And there's now a discussion out there as to whether or not this is purposeful and whether or not it will influence voters. It's gonna have a lot of people. This movie, the audience is gonna be huge. A lot of people are gonna see the movie, and it's a lot of brain-dead people, entertainment, the pop culture crowd, and they're gonna hear Bane in the movie and they're gonna associate Bain. The thought is that when they start paying attention to the campaign later in the year, and Obama and the Democrats keep talking about Bain, Romney and Bain, that these people will think back to the Batman movie, ‘Oh, yeah, I know who that is.’ There are some people who think it'll work. Others think you're really underestimating the American people to think that will work."

He wrapped up:

"You may think it's ridiculous, I'm just telling you this is the kind of stuff the Obama team is lining up. The kind of people who would draw this comparison are the kind of people that they are campaigning to. These are the kind of people that they are attempting to appeal to."

But wait, there’s more! The implication from Sublime Bloviations' Bryan White was that since Limbaugh could not be taken seriously, it was not worth fact-checking (even though even PolitiFact admitted it was a  “pop culture diversion" ). But it gets seriously expanded the following day, as scripted at the Rush Limbaugh website, and serves to further contradict counterirritant’s claims:

So I'm in the library last night, and I'm doing what I always do. I'm doing show prep. And I get a text message from Kathryn who's in with the dogs in the kitchen. She says, "Are you in this Batman movie and you didn't tell me? Is this Batman movie about you?" I said, "What now?" She says, "I can't go anywhere without reading about you and this Batman movie." And I finally, in that moment, folks, I finally figured out what's going on. I outed them. Forget the creator. I don't care that the creator created the character Bane in the Batman movie back in the '90s. It doesn't matter. The Democrats clearly were going to try to link this villain to Mitt Romney. And I outed 'em. They've even got a couple Democrats admitting they were gonna, Chris Leheinous and Jon Stewart. And they're still trying to do it.

You know, independently of the producers and the actors and all the people associated with the movie, they saw it, they were gonna try to make the linkage, and now I'm out there basically accusing them of that, so they've got their backs up. They're acting like I'm some sort of conspiracy creep. But I outed 'em. I have shined the light of truth, as it were.

Counterirritant says Limbaugh never advanced the idea “ that the villain Bane was named in reference to Bain Capital.” Yes he did—he advanced it by being the first one to say “there was a discussion out there whether or not this was purposeful” and associating Bane to Bain and the Democrats in the next few sentences. In other words, if he didn’t advance the idea, what was it then that Limbaugh was “outing” the Democrats for? What precisely was that “light of truth”? Counterirritant debates like White, in that he tries to ignore the obvious.

So, the next issue becomes whether PolitiFact should rightfully consider Limbaugh's claims "a joke."  In 2008, Limbaugh was thought to have “caused mischief” in the Democratic primaries. According to one article, the Indiana primary “may be the first vote in which his influence [was] measured in qualitative terms.” He called it “Operation Chaos.” And more recently, his calling Sandra Fluke a “slut” was taken so seriously, many of his sponsors dropped him.

Lil White Lies Extra: SIX Months--Where's the Beef?

Last February 8, with a follow up on May 17, I posted about a comment added at a blog called "Content In Reality" by my conservative counterpart with regard to a study he was working on:

…I've been busy conducting a study that objectively verifies PolitiFact's ideological bias. I've got all the information for the national operation collected and sorted, and I'm in the process of readying it for publication.

In March, a post at his Sublime Bloviations blogsite suggests this is what it was supposed to be about:

The first PolitiFact Bias research project will suggest that all "Pants on Fire" ratings are unfair and the result of a subjective determination by the responsible PolitiFact teams. [For example,] Pat Boone's statement was neither false nor ridiculously false in any non-subjective sense. It was at least somewhat accurate when considered objectively.

So, I’m still keeping track. It’s still not there. Not at either of his anti-PolitiFact propaganda blogs, not publicized to his "fans" at his PolitiFact Bias Facebook page. I know from my “stat counter” that he very likely has something worked up on Google docs. If he’s done it, he certainly hasn’t made it public.

Here’s a screenprint of the empty page of his blog where I would anticipate such a study would most likely be published. It’s not dated, so to prove the time of the screen snip, I included the blog archive which shows it’s at the seventh post for July (see yellow highlight arrow).

Lil White Lies Extra: Hopelessly De-Voted

Early in June, as I was about to take an intermission from my blog, I received some commentary from my conservative counterpart, lambasting a recent Lil White Lies post on his criticism of a PolitiFact ruling concerning shark attacks and voting fraud in Florida.

I decided not to waste my time with him and deleted his comment; I also felt it was a bit of a threat—basically the sort of argument by intimidation he commonly uses.

Customized for Lil White Lies

He intimated that I had better recant and delete the post called “Jumping the Shark” because it contained such grievous errors...about which, of course, he would elaborate no further. I refused to take the bait….well, until now—and no, I didn’t withdraw the post: it remains intact and unedited. At the time, however, I couldn’t waste time with his never-ending Gish Gallup (thank you, Eric Levine) of why he is the conservative cartel of truth and why anything a liberal says (or I should say, anyone who disagrees with him) doesn’t know what they’re talking about and must be condescended. And if you won’t buy into his bogus quality, he’s then going to resort to quantity. Until he wears you out.

After the threat of whatever error I made ruining my blogging career, he then followed with how "all you liberals have to censor my comments”….an accusation of cowardice (more argument by intimidation), basically. Well, yea, this is my blog and I’m not obligated to publish everyone’s comments….some blogs don’t allow any comments. I didn’t feel like publishing his. He can call me whatever, if I don’t want to publish them, I don’t have to.  Conservatives like to go on and on about freedom, but somehow I don't have the freedom to delete a comment.

So he then posted something to replace those comments at his “Bad Blogs Blood” blog, which I’ve previously described as a poorly formatted, sporadically posted, minutely viewed blog used to supplement his “master blog” for criticism where he wants to give his victim the least web “airtime” possible, to create a class below Slimey Bloviations for blogs that he doesn’t agree with.

But let’s get to the gist of his criticism:

In my original post I pointed to evidence from the Miami Herald that thousands of felons may have voted in the 2000 election. That's the Bush/Gore election. It was illegal at that time for felons to vote in Florida. No question about it. As for my follow up post about the television news story, that wasn't about felons at all. It was about non-citizens voting. Non-citizens aren't allowed to vote whether felons or not.

The way in which I do Lil White Lie posts needs to be explained first. I copy/paste the Grading PolitiFact piece to a Word document, along with the link. That way I only have to go to the Slimey Bloviations blogsite one time. That way I can refer to it as much as I want on one page, and can directly, easily copy whatever White has written if a quotation is needed.

So, since White is complaining that his post was not about felons but about non-citizens, I searched the post first for the word felons…it appears six times, here’s where it appears four times, and you can tell this is what the post was about: (italics added)

The fallacy in PolitiFact's reasoning comes easily to light.

For most of Florida's history as part of the United States it has prohibited voting by felons. Every time a felon votes illegally, it constitutes a case of voter fraud--albeit not the phony representation of "case" settled on by the fact checkers.

Most often nothing can be done to prosecute a case of voter fraud against a felon who votes illegally even though it happens with some regularity. The Miami Herald, for example, reported the following in the wake of its investigations of the 2000 presidential election:

At least 445 Florida felons voted illegally on Nov. 7, casting another cloud over a disputed presidential election already mired in legal challenges, a Herald investigation has found.

So how about “illegal immigrants” or “non-citizens”? The word immigrant could not be found. The word “non-citizen”—the word which White says this post was premised on and that through “fallacious impetus” I missed it, only appeared in a very brief addendum as an update to his “concrete examples” listing the types of voter fraud: “A Florida television station airs a story documenting approximately 100 non-citizens registered to vote in Florida, at least some of whom voted in past elections.”

That was it. I never read whatever follow up story he had after this Grading PolitiFact review. Although he may later have added a link, my copy/paste would have brought it over to my Word document, but it didn’t. My review was based on his original review, as well it should have been, not what he decided to add later about non-citizens.

Grading PolitiFact *Liberal*-Style: Skirting the Wage Gap



At PF Wisconsin wage disparity for doing the same job merits a False; elsewhere, not so.

This post is a combination Grading PolitiFact Review and Grading PolitiFact Liberal Style, because it's turned out to fit both. It focuses on four PolitiFact (PF) rulings on the same subject. Grading PolitiFact’s Bryan White wants them all to be False or Pants on Fire, while to me they're a tentative Half True. The statement is that women earn, on average, 77 cents (or 79 cents or 81 cents, depending on the ruling) for what a man makes…and the addition of “doing the same job” (except for one) which was what brought them down in their rating for the ruling. Four fact-checks on this were done this quarter by PolitiFacts National (a Mostly False for Obama) and Rhode Island (a Mostly False for Congressman David Cicilline) and for the less specific (but supposedly “correct”) statement from senate candidate Tim Caine that it’s not for the same job, which merited a Mostly True from PolitiFact Virginia.

The fourth was from PolitiFact Wisconsin: it was women on average earned 81 cents on the dollar for the same job coming from  Democratic gubernatorial candidate Kathleen Falk, for which she received a False.  So White got his False on one of the statements; however, the PolitiFact Wisconsin review committed the same type of error he lamented in determining the real wage differential among all the occupations, because (according to most of the writers) it couldn’t really be done.

Looking at this chart (see below) from Wikipedia, I don’t know how one couldn’t conclude that women earn less than men. Maybe the gap is closer for the same work in certain categories, but there’s still a gap. Women earn less in almost every occupation ( only more in 4 out of 111, according to PolitiFact Wisconsin). But since we know women generally earn less overall, that gender bias exists (and studies show we’re not sure why) and it’s difficult to find evidence to show that women earn less for the same work across the board, the Mostly Falses (and the False) should have been more like inconclusive Half Trues.

Click to enlarge:  Women's median usual weekly earnings as percentage of men's, for full-time workers, by industry, 2009.

The ruling on Tim Caine of Mostly True where he didn’t add the “for the same job” came with the subtitle “There are many ways to look at pay gap.” This should have been how the “Mostly False” finders should have looked at this to conclude a Half True. Indeed there are many ways to look at it, but there’s still a gap.