Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken [38]
To prove it, Hannity pulls a table, not out of his ass, but out of his “e-ass.” That is, he takes the trouble of going on the Arpanet—oh, I’m sorry, thanks to Gore, it’s the Internet—and downloading a chart from “The Ronald Reagan Homepage.” Lest you think “The Ronald Reagan Homepage” is former President Reagan’s actual official homepage, you should know it’s not. It’s the brainchild of Brett Kottman, who is also the webmaster of Brett Kottman’s Reality Hammer, a page featuring occasional essays defending the Reagan legacy. Hannity plucks the table directly from the web and prints it on page 223 of his book. (Hannity alters the table slightly: He leaves out one key number, which I’ll discuss below.)
The table proves, or should I say, “proves,” or should I say, does not prove that Congress caused the deficit by inflating Reagan’s spending. Here it is, just as Hannity presents it.
Federal Budget Outlays Proposed (Reagan) and Actual (Congress), percent difference, and cumulative percent difference (in billions of dollars)
Source: http//reagan.webteamone.com/reaganbudgets.html
If this is confusing, don’t worry—it was meant to be. Stare at it for a while. In particular, think about the column on the right. Go ahead. Take a good long look. How ya doin’?
Perhaps it will help to read the sentence that Hannity uses to introduce the table: “In fact, had all of Reagan’s budgets been adopted, federal spending would have been 25 percent less on a cumulative basis.”
Let’s parse that sentence. It seems to say that “had all of Reagan’s budgets been adopted, federal spending would have been 25 percent less on a cumulative basis.” In fact, that’s exactly what it says.
What does that mean? Well, it seems to mean that if Congress had passed all of the budgets that Reagan proposed, then the government would have “cumulatively” spent 25 percent less money. That’s a fair interpretation, right? And if true, that means Congress was responsible for the Reagan era deficits.
Now let’s look at the “totals” section of the table. What appears to be the total of Reagan’s proposals are about $200 billion less than what appears to be the total of Congress’s budget-busting appropriations. Or, as the table says in the “average percentage difference” section, the difference is 2.8 percent (or, actually, 2.68 percent—if you’re schooled in long division, as neither Hannity nor his source Kottman seem to be).
How does that get us to the “cumulative” 25 percent? That seems to be where the right-hand column comes in. I stared and stared at the thing, and couldn’t make a whit’s worth of sense out of it. So I faxed the table to some good friends, and Ken Lay, former CEO of Enron, got back to me in a jiff.3
“He’s compounding the difference, Al.”
“I don’t understand, Ken.”
“It’s simple. The first year the difference between Reagan’s proposal and the actual number is 7.3 percent. The second year is 4.5 percent. So, he multiplies 1.073 times 1.045 and gets 1.121. Thus, a 12.1 percent ‘cumulative’ difference. And then on and on.”
“You know what’s funny, Ken? Even over the phone I can hear the quotation marks around the word ‘cumulative.’ ”
“Well, that’s because what he’s doing is completely meaningless. Remember how we just calculated a 12.1 percent cumulative difference? That assumes that when Reagan was making his second budget, he was somehow tied to the ‘actual’ number from the previous year. But he’s not tied. He can propose whatever budget he wants.”
“Hmmm. You see, that time I thought I heard quotation marks around ‘actual.’ ”
“Oh yeah, there’s no reason to trust any of the numbers from this guy. For example, he says that Reagan proposed 695.3 billion dollars in ’82 and Congress approved a budget of 745.8 billion dollars. He got the Reagan number right, but Congress ‘actually’ approved 696 billion dollars in their concurrent budget resolution.”
“Wow! How do you know all