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Recent facts have not been kind to the political right. A better-than-expected jobs report; a renewed focus on inequality, driven both by CBO research and by the gift of Mitt Romney’s candidacy. What to do?
The answer is to throw a bunch of bogus numbers at the issues, in the hope that something sticks, or at least that the discussion becomes confused.
First, about that jobs report: all the usual suspects have jumped on the routine BLS population adjustment to claim that the numbers were cooked. The real story here is that the BLS estimates unemployment based on a monthly survey; this tells us what fraction of workers are unemployed. To turn that into a number of unemployed, the BLS estimates total working-age population; but it updates those estimates only once a year. So there’s usually a step up or down in the totals each January, signifying nothing.
Back in the Bush years there were a lot of bogus claims of huge job growth reflecting a step up in the population numbers. Now we have Rush Limbaugh, Fox, etc., claiming that a step down somehow implies fake calculations. Still not true. And the thing that makes this so tiring is that they keep trotting out the same old bogosity, no matter how many times it has been refuted.
Next up, inequality denial. The Census Gini figure hasn’t moved much since the early 1990s — but as Jon Chait says, we know perfectly well why: it’s because Census numbers are top-coded, that is, cut off at high income levels, and the big gains have come way up the scale.
How do we know that? Partly, just look around: walk around New York’s pricier neighborhoods and tell me that inequality hasn’t increased. But also, income tax data. Here’s what the IRS tells us about income shares at the top:
INCOME SHARES
Notice that the rise is almost entirely concentrated in the top 1 percent; even the bottom half of the top 10 percent went nowhere, which tells you once again that this is about the 1 versus the 99, not the top 20 versus the lower class. And yes, the data are overwhelming support for a rise in inequality.
Oh, and Chait tells us that the usual suspects are also rolling out the old “the rich in America pay more taxes than the rich in other countries” thing. Yes — because the American rich are much, much richer.
In a way it’s almost a relief to find these guys coming up with new fallacies. Brad DeLong catches the WSJ looking at estimates that federal workers get 2 percent more salary and 48 percent more benefits than private-sector workers — and concluding that this means that they are overpaid by 50 percent.
The important point to make here is that all these bogus numbers are coming from seemingly authoritative sources — Fox News, which is a big organization, the WSJ editorial page, the American Enterprise Institute. You could not imagine a similar level of statistical dishonesty from, say, The Nation, or Washington Monthly, or EPI.
This is what I mean when I say that the left and right aren’t symmetric. People of all persuasions lie; but the right has a whole institutional structure of lying that has no counterpart on the left.
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