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By Root 820 0

economists generally agree, that taxing wealth reduces the incentive to invest and in turn holds back economic growth and job creation. That argument isn’t very popular with the public, but at least it’s honest. We can’t say that about the radio ad warning that “your family” could be “buried” by the tax. In fact, the estate tax fell upon only 1.17 percent of the estates of adults who died in 2002, according to the IRS Statistics of Income. In other words, nearly 99 percent of the people who heard those radio ads wouldn’t be touched by the tax at all. With respect to them, the ads were flatly untrue.

LESSON: Saying It Doesn’t Make It So

CRITICS OF THE ESTATE TAX BASED THEIR YEARS-LONG CAMPAIGN on the idea that repealing the tax would primarily benefit farmers and small-business owners. But most of the wealthy few who pay the tax aren’t farmers or small-business owners by any definition. And the vast majority of small-business owners and farmers will never pay a penny of estate tax. Constant repetition of the claim may have caused people to believe it, but repetition didn’t make it true.

An Abortion Distortion

Bogus studies pop up in politics all the time. In 2005, Democrats were gloating over a macabre statistic that would have embarrassed President Bush, if it had been true. They said the number of abortions had gone up since this anti-abortion president took office, and they blamed his economic policies for driving poor women to end pregnancies rather than bear children whom they would be unable to support. Citing “the draconian policies” of Republicans, John Kerry proclaimed, “And do you know that in fact abortion has gone up in these last few years?” The Democratic National Committee chairman, Howard Dean, even went so far as to quantify the purported increase during an appearance on NBC News’s Meet the Press: “You know that abortions have gone up 25 percent since George Bush was president?” In fact, the respected Guttmacher Institute, whose figures on abortion trends are systematically gathered using a disclosed method and are used by both sides—reported that the number of abortions performed in the United States had continued its twenty-year decline after Bush took office. According to the institute’s most recent figures, published in 2006, abortions declined in each of the first three years of Bush’s tenure, for a total drop of nearly 2 percent.

The false claim that abortions were rising originated with a flawed “study” by Glen Harold Stassen, who is neither a statistician nor a healthcare expert, but an ethics professor at Fuller Theological Seminary. Stassen’s article originally appeared not in any scientific journal but in a liberal Christian publication, Sojourners, in October 2004. “Under President Bush, the decade-long trend of declining abortion rates appears to have reversed,” he wrote. “Given the trends of the 1990s, 52,000 more abortions occurred in the United States in 2002 than would have been expected before this change of direction.” Stassen cited data from sixteen states. The claim was picked up and repeated uncritically on many Internet web logs, both liberal and conservative, and by Democrats including Kerry and Dean.

LESSON: Extraordinary Claims Need Extraordinary Evidence

AS THIS TABLE ILLUSTRATES, THE DRAMATIC CLAIM THAT ABORTIONS had suddenly begun to increase—after twenty years of almost uninterrupted annual decreases—begged for confirmation.

Before accepting any such claims, it is wise to first look carefully at the source. In this case, the claim that the trend had suddenly reversed came from a critic of Republican policies who had no track record of evaluating abortion statistics and no special expertise in the field; in addition, the claim was based on fragmentary information.

Stassen got the data wrong for two reasons. First, he tried to project a national trend from an unscientific, nonrandom sample. He used the first sixteen states to report their official abortion data to the federal Centers for Disease Control, without waiting for the other thirty-four states to report.