The War Over Economic Facts

Lies filled the Long Island air on Oct. 16 at the second debate between President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney. It’s provable by deduction: Either the candidates’ accusations of falsehoods were correct or, if not, the accusations themselves were false. A typical exchange centered on the rate of domestic oil production during the Obama presidency:

ROMNEY: Production on private, on government, land …
OBAMA: Production is up.
ROMNEY: … is down.
OBAMA: No, it isn’t.
ROMNEY: Production on government land of oil is down 14 percent.
OBAMA: It’s just not true.
ROMNEY: It’s absolutely true.

It was Abbott & Costello for angry people. (In this case, PolitiFact.com judged Romney’s claim to be—of course!—“Half True.”) In a presidential campaign dominated by the economy, it’s not surprising that both sides have inundated voters with data supporting their positions. What distinguishes this campaign is the inability of the candidates to agree even on basic facts—from whether Romney would cut taxes on the rich to whether Obama doubled the budget deficit. Says Brooks Jackson, director of FactCheck.org, which has been busy this campaign season ferreting out falsehoods: “My observation is that the higher the stakes and the closer the election, the more likely candidates are to start bending and twisting and making stuff up.”
The war over facts reflects a coarsening of America’s politics. Polarization has undermined civility and fair play. Gallup said on Oct. 12 that the gap between Democrats’ and Republicans’ approval rating for the president is the biggest since it began tracking the statistic in 1984. The ideological gap between parties in the House of Representatives is the widest since at least 1879, calculates University of Georgia political scientist Keith Poole. Suffering from cognitive dissonance, partisans on both sides simply can’t believe information that undermines their cause or supports their opponents’. Parties have become as adept at engineering factoids that favor their cause as they are at drawing bizarre congressional districts to maximize their representation in Congress.

Democracy is at risk when ideology overpowers reality. If lawmakers and the public can’t agree on a set of core facts about how the world works, there’s little chance they’ll be able to devise solutions to problems like rising health-care costs or—to name a more immediate crisis—averting the fiscal cliff of tax hikes and spending cuts on Jan. 1, 2013.

Romney’s refusal to be pinned down on his tax plan exemplifies this political season’s loose attachment to reality. Romney says he will cut taxes by about $5 trillion but will offset those cuts entirely by ending deductions and credits for the wealthy. He says he can do this without adding to the deficit or raising taxes on the middle class, and while retaining tax incentives for savings and investment. Is this possible? The Tax Policy Center, which is a nonpartisan joint venture of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, found in an August report that it’s not possible—even if all other breaks for the wealthy are eliminated and even assuming the boost to growth that’s projected by Romney adviser Gregory Mankiw, a Harvard University economist.
Confronted with this clash between plan and reality, Romney and his running mate, Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, have taken a two-pronged approach. They have denigrated the Tax Policy Center as a Democratic front, even though Romney cited it approvingly last spring when it nailed a tax plan of his GOP rival, Rick Perry. And they have brazened out their $5 trillion arithmetic problem. On Oct. 16, Romney changed the subject when pressed for details of his tax plan, citing his management of the Salt Lake City Olympics and attacking Obama’s budget deficits. With his time expiring, he sputtered, “I just described to you precisely how I’d do it, which is with a single number that people can put—and they can put their deductions and credits—[inaudible].” For his part, Obama claimed he wouldn’t raise taxes above where they were during the Clinton administration, conveniently leaving out new taxes associated with the Affordable Care Act.

In the heat of political combat, “studies” become weapons. Romney and Ryan cite a study by consulting firm Ernst & Young that found restoring higher rates in the top tax brackets, as Obama has proposed, could cost 710,000 jobs in the long run. But that’s only if the proceeds go toward more government spending. Romney and Ryan fail to mention that E&Y said the hikes would create 570,000 jobs if the proceeds went toward reducing rates in the lower brackets.