NOT THAT MANY NEW TAXES! Fearful editors praised us rubes, then bailed on their own tax plan:

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 10, 2011

The pitiful state of expertise/Deflated reputation edition: The state of expertise in your country is extremely poor.

No, we’re not talking about the pitiful column Thomas L. Friedman phoned in last night. (Self-parody plainly rules at the Times.) We’re not talking about the way Standard & Poor’s is saying it shouldn’t have to report all its computational errors. (“S.&P., Accused of Faulty Math, Fights Error Disclosure Rule.” For a comical time, click here. )

Please forget about Thomas L. Friedman. Instead, consider what happened when a different Pulitzer winner tried to fact-check a pair of familiar claims.

The Pulitzer winner to whom we refer is Politifact, the prize-winning web site. In this pitiful and undated post, P-fact attempted to check a pair of claims by Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK). Coburn had spoken on Meet the Press. These are the things he said:

COBURN (7/24/11): David, everybody's talking about the symptoms of our problem instead of the real disease. The government's twice the size it was ten years ago. It's 30 percent bigger than it was when President Obama became president.

The problem is, is we're spending way too much money, and it's not hard to cut it without hurting entitlement benefits. But we don't have anybody that wants to do that without getting a tax increase.

“The government's twice the size it was ten years ago. It's 30 percent bigger than it was when President Obama became president.” At present, these are very familiar talking-points (see below). They are used to spread panic about an alleged mammoth increase in federal spending.

On that Meet the Press program, David Gregory let these claims go. For better or worse, Politifact decided to fact-check Coburn’s statements.

Alas! In its pitiful first post, Politifact said this: “Coburn is entirely right about federal outlays doubling over 10 years.” But uh-oh! Soon, the site was retracting its judgment. Incredibly, this was the start of its explanation:

“UPDATE: After we posted this story, a number of readers wrote or tweeted us to point out that we hadn’t adjusted federal outlays either for inflation or for the size of the economy.”

They hadn’t adjusted for inflation! The state of expertise in this country is extremely poor.

After adjusting for inflation, Politifact offered a new assessment. They bumped Coburn’s claims back to “half-true,” for reasons they explain in their second post. (We think they’re still being generous.) But good God! What does it mean when a Pulitzer-winning fact-check site doesn’t know enough to adjust for inflation before getting tweeted by readers?

It means you have a Potemkin press corps, manned by Potemkin journalists.

Sorry, but no: You can’t sensibly compare such amounts over time without adjusting for inflation. Would you compare the temperature in Moscow to the temperature in Dallas without adjusting for Celsius v. Fahrenheit?

In some cases, you might even want to adjust for population growth as you compare spending over time. And a full assessment of Coburn’s claims would involve a wide range of factors. But who would make a ten-year spending comparison without making that most basic adjustment? What does it mean when our brightest “news orgs” conduct their business this way?

At this site, we have sometimes noted how much trouble our “journalists” have with that basic concept—inflation. The inability to handle this basic factor lay at the heart of a topic which helped launched this site—the press corps’ groaning failure, in the mid-1990s, to deal with the brain-dead, two-year debate about GOP Medicare cuts. Inflation’s a very basic factor—and yet, it seems to confound the “press corps” on a regular basis. It caught Politifact by surprise in just the past few weeks.

(We’d be more precise, but the fact-checking site doesn’t traffic in dates.)

Has federal spending risen by thirty percent since Obama took office? At present, the claim is very familiar; it’s used to spread the idea that wild-eyed spending has occurred since Obama took office. It isn’t just Coburn making that claim! Just last weekend, the Washington Post published this letter from a corporatist spin-tank:

LETTER TO THE WASHINGTON POST (8/6/11): Richard Cohen fretted that Tea Party activists have "shrunk the government." He need not worry. Federal spending has gone from $2.9 trillion in 2008 to $3.8 trillion in 2011. Thirty percent spending growth in three years is hardly shrinkage. Even under the Boehner plan, federal spending will continue to increase every year for at least the next decade.

[...]

Ryan Young, Washington

The writer is a fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute

Should the Post have published that letter? We’re not sure! Should the Post mix Fahrenheit temps with Celsius? But then, the New York Times went the Post one better last month, publishing this op-ed column by Grover Norquist:

NORQUIST (7/22/11): Read My Lips: No New Taxes

The Taxpayer Protection Pledge has received increased attention as the Aug. 2 deadline for raising the debt ceiling approaches. My organization, Americans for Tax Reform, created the pledge in 1986 as a simple, written commitment by a candidate or elected official that he or she will oppose, and vote against, tax increases. Over the years many candidates and elected officials have signed the pledge, including 236 current members of the House of Representatives and 41 current senators.

[...]

The problem to be solved is not the deficit; it is overspending. Federal spending in the 2008 fiscal year was $2.9 trillion, and Washington will now spend $3.8 trillion in the fiscal year that ends on Sept. 30. Raising taxes is what politicians do instead of reforming and reducing the cost of government. Advocates of larger government prefer to talk about deficits rather than spending. Why? Because there are two solutions to a deficit problem: spend less or raise taxes. The issue, in other words, isn't the pledge; it's Washington's inability to deal with its own overspending. There is only one fix for a spending problem: spend less.

Should the Times have published that piece? We’re not sure. Is it a good thing when a newspaper’s readers are misled and thus confused?

These claims are technically accurate—and they’re highly misleading. But then, such claims rule all aspects of our public discourse, in much the way Al Gore explained among the Aspens last week (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 8/9/11). It’s easy to play the public for fools when the state of expertise is so poor. This has been the reliable norm for a very long time.

This practice doesn’t work out real well. If you doubt that, take a good look around.

Special report: Still amazed after all these years!