How To Make Statistics Prove Anything
February 9th, 2010
I was just flipping around channels while taking a break from my writing. There was nothing I wanted to watch, so I decided to flip on Glenn Beck for a second to see what kind of crazy he was cooking up. I only watched for about 5 minutes, and saw some of the most extreme cherry picking of data to prove a point that I’ve ever seen. It is so blatant that it took me about 5 minutes to pretty much disprove every point he made simply by adding a little bit more empirical data. Let me show you the magician’s trick…
Start the video at the 4:15 mark:
(if the video doesn’t work, go here to watch it)
So let’s do this part by part:
When you look back in history, who do you think of when you think of huge government programs? FDR, right?
So first he tries to make Obama look like a crazy spender by comparing him to FDR. He shows a chart that he calls “Presidential Spending As A Percent of GDP”. The data is actually US Gov’t spending as a percent of GDP by President, but whatever. The first chart shows the data during FDR’s presidency from 1934 to 1941, and the numbers range from as low as 7.7% to as high as 12%. But FDR didn’t die until 1945, so the chart should have spanned from 1934-1944 at least, and probably to 1945 since he would have been involved with that budget. Why not include it? Because it’s WWII, and the spending numbers skyrocket after 1941 to as high as 43.6% in 1943 & 1944. Now, you could argue that the WWII numbers doesn’t make it a fair assessment. I mean its not like Obama has to budget in a war, or two. But Beck doesn’t exactly explain or present it like that.
The highest if you see, in 1941, you might remember that date because it’s supposed to live in infamy
Now a casual watcher would think, wow, the first year of WWII and we only spend 12% of GDP? But the date that lives in infamy is December 7th, 1941. That means that the 1941 budget would absolutely not include any WWII money. This is a completely dishonest way to present this data. If you want to argue that after ’41 there is WWII and the number skyrockets and it’s not fair to compare, then that’s one thing. But instead of an explanation of why this data doesn’t span the entire presidency of FDR, all he does is try to give the impression that the 1941 figure includes WWII, which it doesn’t.
Then he shows the Obama proposed budget numbers, which span from 22.8% to 25.4%. Wow, that’s a lot bigger than the FDR pre-WWII numbers (7.7% – 12%) isn’t it? Obama is twice as much a big gov’t guy as FDR huh? But how about we compare Obama’s numbers to someone considered very fiscally responsible, someone like say Ronald Reagan:
1980: 21.7%
1981: 22.2%
1982 : 23.1%
1983 : 23.5%
1984 : 22.1%
1985 : 22.8%
1986 : 22.5%
1987 : 21.6%
1988: 21.2%
How is this sustainable? Forget sustainable; how is this sensible? How is this not suicidal?
Wow, Reagan’s gov’t spent almost identical amounts per GDP as Obama plans to. If you look at the numbers of any modern US presidency, there isn’t a huge difference in this number from each other. Now, if you’d like to see the gov’t spend less, that is a perfectly legitimate position, but you should present the data fairly, not rely on trickery to scare people into thinking Obama’s spending is way worse than it actually is in context.
Let’s move on. Next, Beck pulls out his chalk board to show some very dishonest numbers:
“No! Bush is the one responsible! It’s his fault!”
Is it? Let’s look at the facts for a second. How much debt have the past couple of presidents racked up?
Bill Clinton through his eight years ran up an average of 0.8 percent of GDP in deficit per year. Is that good? Well, not in any context other than government. If your company was losing money like this, you’d be thinking about blowing management out. If your household was losing money like this, you’d be getting an extra job and cancelling the cell phone and pay channels. But in politics, Clinton looks like the most fiscally responsible man in the universe.
(Of course, this was mainly because of the yet to be discovered Internet bubble and the yet to be discovered financial scandals. But honestly, if you want to believe it was because of his magical policies, that’s fine with me for the moment.)
Now, let’s look at Bush. Here is his number for eight years: 2 percent per year on average. Is that bad? Yes, it sure is. But I can hear those on the left saying: “Well, 2009 was Bush’s fault — not Obama’s!”
OK, I’m in a giving mood. Let’s blame everything from 2009 on Bush. That raises his average to 2.7 percent. We can all agree that this number is unacceptable. Right?
So what about President Obama? Surely, the man who spends all of his time criticizing the last administration must be creating less debt than that irresponsible President Bush did during his presidency, right?
Nope. The average debt in a theoretical eight-year Obama presidency is: 5.9 percent. Remember, this is based on President Obama’s budget numbers, not Glenn Beck’s crazy opinion.
But hey, that’s not fair. We need to eliminate 2009 out of Obama’s score because we already gave that to President Bush. Fair enough. (I could mention at this point that Obama voted for TARP, so he’s at least partially responsible for that debt too, but that’s another story for another day.) If we delete 2009 from the Obama score, it lowers all the way to 5.5 percent — still more than double Bush’s average.
So here’s the problem with the way he is presenting all of this. He is taking an average of all of the years of each presidency, but if you chart out the data, it reveals way more information and context:
As you can see, Bill Clinton is handed a gov’t with a 4.58% deficit per GDP under the first Bush, and steadily takes it up to a 2.42% surplus in his last year. Remember this:
Is that good? Well, not in any context other than government. If your company was losing money like this, you’d be thinking about blowing management out. If your household was losing money like this, you’d be getting an extra job and cancelling the cell phone and pay channels. But in politics, Clinton looks like the most fiscally responsible man in the universe.
See, with more context around the info, it is easy to see Beck is being extremely dishonest here. Then you can see that Bush takes that surplus and creates the deficit we have now. And then if you look at Obama’s proposed figures, he still takes the yearly deficit as is and lowers it. Even Beck continues to lower the average for Obama as he takes away each year.
Now maybe that’s not good enough for you and you want no deficit at all, but you have to at least present all of the data honestly, or there is no reason to take your point of view seriously if it is based on lies. That is the facts. If you think a few scientists presenting some numbers dishonestly negates global warming, then by that logic you would be required to also consider anything from this hack to be factually untrue as well.
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