Proofiness - Charles Seife [13]
As you probably know, this change is caused by inflation. Goods and services get a touch—typically around 3 percent—more expensive every year. Year after year, it takes more dollars to buy a gallon of paint, and it also takes more dollars to hire someone to paint your house, more dollars to take the bus to get to work, and more dollars to do just about everything you need money to do. Thus the almighty dollar gets less and less valuable as the years tick by. This makes it a little bit difficult to compare spending over time; you’ve got to adjust for inflation, taking into account the changing value of the dollar. However, sometimes people conveniently “forget” to make that conversion to make their arguments seem stronger. In November 2005, a group of House Democrats (the “Blue Dog Coalition”) attacked George W. Bush with this little tidbit:
Throughout the first 224 years (1776-2000) of our nation’s history, 42 U.S. presidents borrowed a combined $1.01 trillion from foreign governments and financial institutions according to the U.S. Treasury Department. In the past four years alone (2001-2005), the Bush Administration has borrowed a staggering $1.05 trillion.
These figures are all true, and, yes, Bush was quite the deficit spender. However, this comparison is utterly meaningless because it’s comparing apples to oranges—2005 and 2001 dollars are very different from 1776 and 1803 and 1926 dollars. The Louisiana Purchase cost $15 million; Alaska was a bargain at roughly half that. Back then, those were enormous expenditures that only wealthy states could afford. Nowadays the same sum is the cost of a fancy Manhattan penthouse. Past presidents who drove up the nation’s debt did it in much smaller dollar figures simply because those dollar figures represented a lot more purchasing power than they do today.
Comparing apples and oranges can be quite powerful; used skillfully, it can make the false seem true and the true seem false. For example, in 2005, the director of the National Science Foundation gently bragged about the agency’s budget request for the following year. The NSF, he said, would get “$132 million, or 2.4 percent, more than in [fiscal year] 2005. This modest increase allows us to assume new responsibilities, meet our ongoing commitments, and employ more staff. . . .” At first glance, a $132 million increase seems like something to celebrate. But the number was a fruit packer’s fantasy. It came from comparing 2006 dollars to 2005 dollars without taking inflation into account. The 2006 dollar was worth less than the 2005 dollar, so the “increased” budget in 2006 would in fact be worth less than the budget in 2005. If you crunch the numbers properly, that $132 million increase was a disaster; in fact, the agency would be losing about $30 million (in 2006 dollars). There wouldn’t be any extra money for new responsibilities or new staff. The NSF director was lying, turning a defeat into a victory.
By comparing apples with oranges, a skilled official can make a decrease look like an increase, up look like down, and black look like white. It’s Orwellian—comparing apples to oranges can make fiction of fact and fact of fiction.13
Yet another variety of fruit-packing, apple-polishing, is used to put the finishing touches on data, manipulating them so they appear more favorable than they actually are. Just as greengrocers employ subtle artifices to make