Lil White Lies: Battle of the Bulge

As noted in my profile and a my last Sidebar post, I’ve made some analogies to my employment with “one of the Big Three” domestic automakers. This one draws on my accounting experience some years ago working in “Budget and Forecast”, to wit: one time “emergency” temporary expenditures, budget-wise, are not relevant to the base budget when discussing either decreases or increases. Let me repeat that with appropriate words emboldened: one time “emergency” temporary expenditures, budget-wise, are not relevant to the base budget when discussing either decreases or increases.

So my conservative counterpart, as with his previous commentary to my criticism of his treatment of a remark by Alan Grayson, misses again the overall “big picture”—Jeb Hensarling’s gross exaggeration (which he admits) of the increase in the budgets of various government departments due to the temporary effects of the stimulus, should be considered false because they are not relevant: even Hensarling stated “this is not the forum in which to debate the stimulus.”

It’s like a family budget where in a single month the car breaks down, and the car insurance/property taxes are due, it’s mid winter and there’s been a freeze and your home heating bill is through the roof, but in the mood for future travel you decide to open a travel-point Visa credit card at the Bank of Hensarling, but it denies you in a rejection letter saying “Your expenses appear to greatly exceed your ability to pay, so we cannot grant you credit at this time.” Is that a fair assessment of your creditworthiness and what occurred budget-wise for you that month? Did your budget grow if you had set aside for insurance, taxes and emergencies?

Somebody lost his marbles on
criticizing this ruling.

In other words, as Elmendorf stated, what the family really had was “a bulge in discretionary funding and then to uh, um, an attenuated bulge in outlays.” That’s why writer Lou Jacobson said that what is known as outlays is “a distinction that becomes important to [the] analysis.” It’s not just important, it’s crucial.

Hensarling’s goal was to emphasize in an overtly grandiose way the size of the stimulus against the budgets/expenditures of the departments as shown. But it had nothing to do with the base budgets. And stating that the “American people deserve the facts” is disingenuous at best, because these are not facts, they are merely massaged calculations in a faulty comparison, for the purpose of misleading and dramatizing "government over-spending."

My conservative counterpart concludes by knocking the editor Martha Hamilton for not catching “the fact that Hensarling was quite clear that the effects of the stimulus are temporary.” Neither she nor Jacobson couldn’t have noticed that word in the heading, unlike Bryan?  Bryan’s lost his marbles just making that suggestion.

PolitiFact Detractors: Tax Cut Dilution (or Delusion?)

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.”

Lil White Lies: "B" Stimulating (Updated)

Bryan White gave Shirl Kennedy a “B” grade this time as researcher. However, Becky Bowers, listed as writer and researcher, was graded “F”. So that begs the question (in Bryan’s logical world), if Kennedy got a “B” how did the research count for Bowers, since we have no way of knowing how much research she did compared to Shirl. What if Bowers actually did more of the research, and Kennedy only assisted in a minor perfunctory way? That means that Bryan’s “B” grade for Kennedy made no sense, because he would have had to lift up Bowers' grade of “F” to include her above-average “B” research.

Bryan said “Kennedy apparently provided research appropriate for that focus and presumably was not involved in framing the story.” So she got a “B” for having more than 23 sources to determine only if “no private sector jobs were created with the stimulus.” Well how about Bowers? That list of sources did not list with each one the name of the person who actually did the review of those sources, or calling or interviewing. He only dismissed Kennedy because she wasn’t involved in framing the story. That doesn’t mean that Bowers should get some credit.

It can also mean Bryan’s “special top super duper secret formula grade compilation system” may be zero or below 50 points for F. It’s not what at one time was 93-100=A, 85-92=B, 77-84=C, 70-76=D, and anything below 70 Failing or F. Or some instructors who just did 10 point increments. Bryan’s must be well below 70, or even down to zero for F-. So for Bowers, her grade from Bryan as writer was SO low that even averaging in the B for her research responsibility, still gave her an F. Or maybe Bryan’s grading system is…..not really what he says it is, it just reflects his seeming animosity toward PolitiFact and his own inherent right-leaning belief that PF is left-leaning. 

Lil White Lies: To "B" or Not To "B"

Some people know “how to say it”…Derek Grass, a frequent Facebook PolitiFact commenter, is one. Maybe because it’s “manno a manno”, I don’t know. But Derek makes the point that Bryan is a “DIP”—demander [of] impossible perfection—when it comes to judging PolitiFact’s (PF) fact-check articles.

This is a portion of their debate over August 12-14, 2010. I have corrected some of Derek’s capitalization/spelling errors as it appears he was communicating from a cell/blackberry. I have put the most significant comments in bold type.