It appears Bryan White is on a part-time vacation at PolitiFact Bias (or is busy with his real job), so "Deff Jeff" Dyberg is trying to fill in. For his most recent post, he tries to make a case that PolitiFact is mathematically challenged, or at least mathematically biased. Bryan’s added comment will be addressed here as well.
Dyberg reviews an article by Jeffrey H. Anderson with the Conservative Weekly Standard, who is contesting PolitiFact’s awarding a False on the Truth-o-Meter to John Boehner, who tweeted that “POTUS’ economists: ‘Stimulus’ Has Cost $278,000 per job.” Anderson asks “what does PolitiFact have against long division?”
Dyberg’s conclusion on Anderson’s review:
In the end we're left with yet another (and multiple) examples of PolitiFact taking an objective, verifiable statement, constructing a straw man, and quickly demolishing their creation. Anderson never implied that the $278,000 figure represented salaries per job. He was making a point regarding the expense of the stimulus overall and putting it into a context that was easily digested by readers. It's impressive (if not disturbing) the lengths PolitiFact went to in order to distort and discard Anderson's valid premise.
Yes, drag out that straw man one more time, except that it doesn’t invalidate the argument (that's called "the fallacy of the fallacy," Bryan White's best kept secret). It’s NOT an objective or verifiable statement simply because the divisor cannot be objectively verified, besides the dilution of the tax cuts. Tax cuts made up 43% of the stimulus (or about $120,000 per job created of the $278,000). Tax cuts: what White and Dyberg (and Boehner and all the Republicans) think is the only thing that can create jobs.
But before I begin let me address Dyberg’s claim that “PolitiFact fails to offer evidence that Anderson did classify the entire stimulus spending as salaries.” Anderson also denied this saying “I never said that the $278,000 per job was all spent on salaries or wages.”
The implication clearly comes from this paragraph in Anderson’s original criticism, if Dyberg had bothered to read it:
In other words, the government could simply have cut a $100,000 check to everyone whose employment was allegedly made possible by the “stimulus,” and taxpayers would have come out $427 billion ahead.
Anderson’s “implying” that merely paying those (a $100,000 salary) who became employed was the same thing as a stimulus that consisted of tax cuts, aid to states for existing programs, and projects. This was duly noted in the PolitiFact ruling.
But what we really have is a verifiable statement that tax cuts don’t work, because tax cuts were the majority of the stimulus. That is what Anderson, Dyberg and White don’t realize they are tacitly admitting to, no matter which divisor you use.
And if you want to take it one step further, let’s go over the cost per job created of George W. Bush’s so-called stimulative tax cuts in 2001 and 2003. The tax cuts cost $1.7 Trillion and created anywhere from 2.6 to 8.0 million jobs. If you use the "charitable" 8.0 million, that’s $212,500 per job (since Bryan White questions whether $185,000 per job can be considered “successful”). And, since Anderson used stats and timings that suggest the Stimulus actually had a negative effect on employment, if you do likewise with Bush’s job creating tax cuts up to and following the crash of 2008, it’s the same damn thing….his tax cuts had an adverse effect on job creation, just like the stimulus. It’s enough to give you indigestion.
This doesn’t wash as a “tu quoque” argument either. It simply says that Conservatives shouldn’t complain about using a combined approach where their own textbook solution is part of the combination, and where their own solution has proven to be failure, and just as if not more costly per job, in the eight prior years. In fact, the argument has been made that if the tax cuts had not been included, and that 43% had been projects, the Stimulus would have been more successful. But that’s something for Keynesians to argue about.
No comments:
Post a Comment