This post is by Phil Price.
We’re all used to distortions and misleading statements in political discourse — the use of these methods one thing on which politicians are fairly nonpartisan. But I think it’s rare to see an outright lie, especially about a really major issue. We had a doozy yesterday, when Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann presented a graphic that attributed the 2009 federal budget to the Obama administration. Oddly, most of the other facts and figures she presented were correct, although some of them seem calculatedly misleading. If you’re going to lie about something really big, why not just lie about everything?
Phil,
Try writing down the deficits from the proposed budgets for each year. Maybe note which President "proposed" each budget. Then maybe note how the federal fiscal year in the US is not perfectly aligned with the calendar year.
I'd be happy to write your correction for you:
"Oops, it appears someone I accused of lying actually was not. I had a lack of understanding of the deficits under each president. The chart they used goes by the calendar year the budget began rather than the official fiscal year. I assumed that they were wrong because of some bias on my part. I was somehow unaware that Obama's first budget deficit was significantly larger than Bush's."
Also, please don't fall back on giving the legitimate reasons why the deficit increased under Obama. You accused them of lying without addressing any of their points — specifically without even trying to understand their points. Had you made that effort you would not have made that mistake.
If the Obama administration is going to claim credit for jobs created in 2009, surely it's fair to blame them for the deficit then too?
http://kittyreporter.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/…
I am reminded of Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
I could see this as a stupid error (conflating "was in office in 2009" and "was responsible for the budget for 2009"), rather than a deliberate lie. The pressure of a deadline and a desire to find damning facts–even for someone theoretically familiar with the mechanics of Washington–could be enough to lead to this serious blunder.
Of course, that doesn't raise her credibility at all. Trustworthiness isn't just about character, but competence, too. I won't trust the work of an incompetent professional any more than that of a dishonest one.
First off, I am biased – Bush was an airhead who destroyed the American economy by dropping $1,000,000 bombs from $1,000,000,000 planes. Second off – I know nothing about American finances but that ought not to be a problem if the graph was done properly.
My problem is – why is the gap between the red and blue bars different to the gap between the same colour bars. It's either a mistake or an attempt to mislead by capturing more deficit in the first blue bar.
And for that matter, why doesn't the scale start at zero.
Phil
You appear to be crossing the line with this post. Your title is inappropriate and you really don't address what you are upset about. I suggest you spend more time addressing the LIE and less time partaking in smearing.
This blog has historically been focused on facts not smearing. Please keep focused on what the blog has done well and leave smearing to the media
The fiscal year (FY) for the federal budget starts in October and runs through the following September. For instance, the federal budget for FY 2009 started on the first of October 2008, and ran through the end of September 2009.
The FY 2009 budget was proposed by President George W Bush in early 2008 and was approved by Congress, with fairly minor modifications, in a series of separate appropriations bills over the next couple of months. All of these votes took place before Obama was even elected president, and many months before he took office.
The budget submitted by President Bush was projected (by him) to lead to a deficit of about $400 billion. However, because of the recession, tax receipts in FY 2009 were $600 billion higher than projected and expenditures were also higher. Consequently, the total budget deficit for FY 2009 was $1.4 trillion, as indicated in Bachmann's chart. The number is correct, and the size of the bars is correct…but attributing it to Obama is not correct. It just isn't.
This is not a matter of fiscal years versus calendar years. Attributing all of the 2009 calendar-year budget to Obama would also be incorrect; the budget he proposed in early 2009 didn't go into effect until September 2009.
There were some additional emergency appropriations and tax cuts, requested by Obama, that went into effect during FY2009 but, as of the end of 2009, they did not amount to anything remotely approaching $1.4 trillion.
There is just no factually correct way to assign a 2009 budget deficit of $1.4 trillion to the Obama administration, no matter what games you play with fiscal year versus calendar year or normal versus supplementary appropriations. It's just wrong.
Whether incorrectly assigning the 2009 deficit to Obama is a "lie" or not depends on whether Bachmann knew it was false. Max kindly suggests that this may have been an innocent error: Obama was in office during 2009, so maybe Bachmann assumed the government was operating according to his budget. If Bachmann were picked at random from the general population, it would be plausible that she made this mistake, but she wasn't: she's a U.S. congresswoman who was elected to the House in 2006. She knows when budgets are submitted, when they are voted upon, and when they go into effect. There's just no way she thought the budget in 2009 was Obama's. The assertion is, in short, a lie.
Misleading political graphics are pretty common — axes that don't start at zero, numbers that exclude certain expenditures or sources of income, all sorts of other problems like those discussed by Tufte and Paulos and others. But you rarely see a budget deficit attributed to the wrong president! Or at least, I think it's rare…perhaps some intrepid blog commenters can find other examples of this sort of egregious intentional error. I don't recall seeing it before.
Megan,
You asked: "why is the gap between the red and blue bars different to the gap between the same colour bars."
It's an excel charting issue — Within each year, the red bars are on the left and blue on the right. Look at the distance from the tick marks. Red bars are much closer to the left and further from the right, blue bars are the reverse.
You also asked: "And for that matter, why doesn't the scale start at zero."
It does start at zero. The deficit increased almost 150% under Obama's first proposed budget.
Max,
Should we assume that you made an honest mistake believe Phil's lie? Or should we assume you are trying to actively suppress the truth of the graph?
Phil, did you pull this from the Daily Kos site? That's the only place I've seen the image from my searches.
Even the Cato Institute aren't willing to blame Obama for Bush's 2009 deficit.
No comment on the content of this post, but a comment on the quite fanatic pro-Bush reactions here. As a European, I am having some difficulties to understand how Bush gets away with everything in the US. Towards other continents, he gave America a pretty bad reputation. Obama succeeds in partially restoring a more positive image of the US.
Gay tolerance, environment, health care, pacifism, … are some of our basic values, while these appear to be rather unsupported by the American population.
Perhaps I am a bit biased.
Sean – I'm curious, do you disagree that the 2009FY budget was proposed by Bush? Your rhetorical questions make it seem like you do. On the other hand you must know that's wrong:
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/browse.html
Or is your point that the actual budget didn't project the 1.4trillion deficit? That's right I guess, but seems like an odd point – surely Obama is not going to be blamed for the crisis and the fact that the original projections fell flat?
Or do you think that: "The chart they used goes by the calendar year the budget began rather than the official fiscal year."
So that "2009" would actually refer to the 2010FY and the the 2009FY would be listed as 2008? That would be pretty weird (but not in itself misleading), so lets assume it is the case:
Why would 2008 have such a low deficit then? You might say "because they use the projected budget numbers in the president's budget". But that's not the case – the projected number for 2010FY was lower than 1.2trillion. The >1.4tr is clearly the actual deficit of the 2009FY
You still might have a point – but so far I don't see it.
I can read the Daily Kos if I want partisan political name-calling. There is no substantive point in this post.
The Treasury provides a tool that allows you to determine the National Debt (and hence the deficit, by subtraction) as a function of time. And yes, the 2009 budget was proposed by Bush and was in effect from October 1, 2008 through September 30, 2009.
http://www.treasurydirect.gov/NP/BPDLogin
Roger:
The commenters might be right that Bachmann made a mistake rather than a lie. On the other hand, I think Phil has a point that as member of congress making a national speech, she should really take the trouble to get her facts right. She has a paid staff, after all.
Phil: You wrote:However, because of the recession, tax receipts in FY 2009 were $600 billion higher than projected and expenditures were also higher.
Did you mean that receipts were $600B lower because of the recession? I don't know the actual figures myself, but as it is, your statement doesn't make economic sense (receipts generally fall in recessions), and the numbers don't add up as you present them:
Expected deficit: $400B
Unexpected change in receipts: +$600B
Unexpected change in spending: +$600B
With these number, the expected deficit would equal the actual one.
I was wrong — you're right Phil, about the error.
My mistake: I took a look and assumed that it was using the proposed budget deficits labelled in the year they were proposed. It would have been disingenuous, but not outright incorrect. Should have taken my own advice and actually looked those and the actual deficit numbers up to see which was closer to the chart.
I still dislike the framing, and demand the right to get erroneously pissy in the comments though.
@Marcel – yes, of course Phil meant "lower"
@Sean – at least for me, as long as you own up to your mistakes, you get to be pissy ;-) (that is one of the reasons why talking to someone with a different opinion is so much better than listening to pols and pundits – those will never admit they're wrong.)
Marcel, yes, I meant tax receipts in 2009 were much _lower_ than predicted.
Sean, no, I don't read Daily Kos and didn't know that this was discussed there…or anywhere, actually, although I'm not surprised: it would be very surprising if I were the only person to be struck by it. I watched Bachmann's presentation on YouTube the day after the SOTU address, and was struck by this incredible graphic and the words that went with it. I did a screen grab from the YouTube video to get the graphic.
I still wish someone would give me some insight into the question of why someone would use actual numbers for things like unemployment rate, the magnitude of the 2009 budget deficit, and so on — things that many of us would have to look up in order to fact-check — but would lie about something that a pretty large fraction of people would recognize immediately is not correct. Can people please stop calling me (and each other) names, at least long enough to give me some insight into this?
Along the same lines, the NYT has lots of fact-checkers but they still published a op-ed by Glaeser based in part on the claim that Harris County was a suburb of Houston.
And in Bachmann's defense, at least she didn't use this graph:
http://observationalepidemiology.blogspot.com/201…
"…something that a pretty large fraction of people would recognize immediately is not correct. "
I think you're simply mistaken about this. Republicans have been quite effective in blaming all deficit woes on Obama. I don't think the majority of Americans is buying that, but I think Bachman is mainly talking to/for relatively conservative Republicans and/or Tea partiers. And I think those people actually believe this graph.
I'm not going to speculate on whether she herself believes it or whether she's consciously lying in order to hammer in the point that Obama=deficit, but I certainly think it's a pretty effective rhetorical strategy, so I'm not surprised she's using it.
(On a related note, I'm wondering if "getting caught" isn't maybe even part of the strategy. Some of the more populist tea partiers built on a sense of joint victimization with their supporters. And getting called "liers" and "stupid" etc. by "liberals" and "academics" might actually help cement that support – regardless of whether said liberals and academics are right).
If you are going to attack a politician for lying, you should (1) clearly identify the offending statement, (2) explain why it is wrong, and (3) give a link to the source so that the reader can check the context. Phil doesn't really explain himself until the comments.
Here is the Bachmann transcript.
The point of her speech was not to say how much Bush was better than Obama. She says that Bush's deficits were too high, and complains about the $700 billion bailout. Her point is that deficits have grown unacceptably high in the last couple of years, and that Obama policies like Obamacare are making things worse.
Phil's main point seems to be that while the 2009 spending was mostly under the Obama administration, it is a lie to say so, because the spending was passed by Congress after a Bush proposal. This is a dubious point, because the Democrats controlled Congress at that time, and Obama voted for that spending.
But even if Phil is right that Obama is blameless for the 2009 deficit, Bachmann's speech is still not a lie. Her purpose is not to assign blame for that. She says, "we saw an unprecedented explosion of spending and debt" and she criticizes Obama's strategy for fixing the economy. She is not blaming Obama for causing the bad economy, but for what he is doing about it.
Roger, in my original post I said "We had a doozy yesterday, when Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann presented a graphic that attributed the 2009 federal budget to the Obama administration." I think that very clearly identifies what is wrong.
I don't really understand the rest of your point. I'm not saying anything about Congress, or blame vs. blamelessness, or the validity or lack thereof of Bachmann's points or speech. All I'm saying is that the graphic incorrectly identifies the 2009 federal budget with the Obama administration, when in fact it was passed, and signed into law, under the Bush administration.
If Bachmann wished to make your point about Congress rather than the President being to blame, that's fine, she could have made a graphic that identified all of the budget deficits with Pelosi (the Speaker of the House) or something. It might have seemed ridiculous or silly or misleading, but at least it wouldn't have been factually wrong!
Phil, if that is all that you are saying, then you should have said so. But you are still wrong. Bachmann did not say anything about who signed the 2009 budget into law. The chart is labeled "Annual Deficit Comparison". It is comparing the deficit, not the proposed budget. I do not know whether the figures are for the fiscal year or the calendar year, but since you do not seem to know either, I will give Bachmann the benefit of the doubt. It is in fact true that we had a very large deficit in the calendar year 2009, and it is in fact true that 2009 was almost entirely under the Obama administration. You say that the graphic "attributed the 2009 federal budget" but the graphic does not mention any budget and does not attribute any budget to anyone.
Roger – and your "benefit of the doubt" would be misplaced – the figures are for the fiscal year. It's easy enough the compare them to the FY figures plus the CBO doesn't even release calendar year figures.
As for the budget: You really don't think it's grossly misleading to attribute a budget deficit that's due to 95% to decisions taken during the Bush presidency to the Obama presidency? Comparing the two presidencies is the _specific_ point of the chart as shown by its title.
I guess you do believe that's honest debate, but then you also seem to believe it's a-ok to call people you've never met "sluts" on your blog, so given that's your standard for decency in debates I guess we shouldn't be surprised.
Roger,
The graphic I posted includes the whole legend, but it got cutoff in being automatically resized to fit in the blog page. Interestingly, if I click on the graphic and move the mouse slightly, I can see the whole graphic.
The legend — if you could see it — attributes the red bars to President Bush and the blue bars to President Obama. The title of the chart is Annual Deficit Comparison. The graphic asserts that the 2009 federal deficit is attributable to President Obama. Which is false. As I discussed in an earlier comment that I suggest you read, it's false whether you consider the calendar year or the fiscal year.
Please do read that previous comment; I suspect you're simply unaware that things like tax rates, social security payments, the military budget, etc., are decided several months in advance. If you think about it, you'll realize that that pretty much has to be true. The budget deficit in any given year is almost entirely determined by votes that took place several months earlier.
Phil and Sebastian, do you even know what a "budget" is? Yes, budgets are planned in advance. That is what the word means. But Bachmann's chart does not compare budgets or budget deficits. It compares deficits. You are still misreading the chart.
Great post Phil. I have heard the deceit in the graph repeated on conservative radio. The speakers cover themselves with the technical truth that Obama "presided over" the budgets represented by the scary blue bars. But while that line is technically correct, it is (pretty obviously) intentionally misleading. The attempt is to make the listener believe that Obama's policies are responsible for the scary budgets. The people offering this line know that budgets don't work like this, but they are betting that their listeners don't know anything about how budgets actually work. Now, I haven't looked too closely at accounts of what makes something a lie, but when someone tells me something that is technically correct with the intention of getting me to believe something that is false, I call that a lie.
Roger,
I agree with you that the chart compares deficits. That's why I said, for instance, "The graphic asserts that the 2009 federal deficit is attributable to President Obama. Which is false." I honestly don't know what point you're making.
Jonathan, I hadn't heard the "presided over" terminology. That's quite funny.
Phil, your original post said, "Bachmann presented a graphic that attributed the 2009 federal budget to the Obama administration." She did not. The 2009 budget originated with Bush, but the deficit occurred under Obama. Bachmann's graphic says nothing about budgets. She is concerned with actual spending, not proposed spending.
Roger,
Either you are writing nonsense, or I am completely misunderstanding you. Or both.
The actual budget in 2009 was determined almost entirely by votes that took place in 2008. Which means that the actual budget deficit was determined almost entirely by votes that took place in 2008. Not the proposed budget, the actual budget. It makes no sense to say "the budget was Bush's, but the deficit was Obama's." It's either Obama's budget and Obama's deficit, or it's Bush's budget and Bush's deficit. But it's not Obama's budget or his deficit — both the tax bills and spending bills were passed in 2008.
Here, try it this way. In early 2009, people paid their 2008 income taxes. That's a major source of government revenue, obviously. The tax rates etc. had been voted on by congress in mid-2008 and signed into law by President Bush. Perhaps you are arguing that even as late as January 20, when Obama was inaugurated, it would have been possible for Congress to retroactively change the 2008 tax rates, claw back whatever money had already been sent out in early-bird refunds, reprint all of the 100 million tax forms and books…?
I'll let you have the last word here, since I think everyone reading this thread can see that you're not making sense.
Roger,
The chart absolutely does attribute the 2009 federal budget to the Obama administration. It does so because a big chunk of the 2009 deficit was due to spending proposed by President Bush in his budget for FY 2009, and the chart attributes the entire 2009 deficit to President Obama. Ipso facto, the chart attributes to the Obama administration that part of the deficit due to the 2009 federal budget.
But as I said above, even if you retreat to the claim that the chart says only that President Obama presided over the 2009 deficit, the chart would still be a lie. It would still be a lie in that case because while technically, literally true, it would be intentionally deceptive. The deceptive intention is clear: to make people believe that President Obama's policies are directly and completely responsible for the historic deficit in 2009. The Libertarian Cato Institute doesn't think President Obama is completely to blame for 2009 spending. And even the more conservative Heritage Foundation eventually had to admit that "Presidents Bush and Obama share responsibility for the FY 2009 budget deficit that overlaps their administrations."
Jonathan, I might agree with you that Bachmann's speech was technically literally true but intentionally deceptive, if (as you say) she were clearly intending to make people believe that President Obama's policies are directly and completely responsible for the historic deficit in 2009.
But I did not get that intent from her speech at all. She seems almost as willing to blame Republicans as Democrats. Remember, this was the tea party response, not the Republican response. I gave a link to the transcript above. If Phil's point is about her intent, then he should post a quote that demonstrates it and explain why he thinks that was her intent.
Roger,
I read the transcript, and I watched the video of Bachmann's response. She is clearly attributing all of the 2009 deficit to President Obama. She says (starting around 2:10 in the linked video), "Well, deficits were unacceptably high under President Bush, but they exploded under President Obama's direction, growing the national debt by an astounding $3.1 trillion." When she says this, she first gestures at the red bars in the chart to indicate the deficits under Bush and then at the blue bars to indicate the explosion under Obama. (Note that the $3.1 trillion figure only makes sense if she is including the whole $1.4 trillion for 2009.)
What could she possibly mean by "under President Obama's direction" in this context that saves her claim from being a lie? The most straightforward reading is that the deficits exploded under President Obama's direction of federal spending. That is, as a consequence of President Obama's policies. That is both literally false and intentionally misleading (a lie). You could fix the literal falsehood by stretching for an alternative reading of the phrase, taking it to mean "while President Obama presided" or some such. But we all know that on such a reading the statement in its context is still intentionally misleading (a lie).
What could she possibly mean by "under President Obama's direction" in this context? Just read the context for the answer. The preceding paragraph complains about what was done "After the $700 billion bailout, the trillion-dollar stimulus, and the massive budget bill with over 9,000 earmarks". The following paragraph complains about "Obamacare". It seems to me that she is only blaming Obama for what is directly attributable to him.
Jonathan, please do not justify your misreading by saying "we all know". I do not know that anyone was misled by what Bachmann said. You and Phil have made an entirely false accusation based on a misreading of Bachmann, a misunderstanding of what the word "budget" means, and a disregard for the evidence on what she was intending. There is much more reason to say that you and Phil are intentionally misleading, because you criticize her by attributing words to her that she did not use.
Roger,
The $700 billion payout was for the TARP bailout proposed by President Bush and passed during his administration. So, not attributable to Obama. Again, Bachmann doesn't say anything technically false here. She doesn't come right out and attribute the TARP spending to Obama. But she certainly sets up the listener to associate Obama with that $700 billion bailout. (Incidentally, she is also wrong about the size of the bailout, which is now expected to cost only $25 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office.)
You're right that Bachmann's next paragraph complains about Obamacare, but that is actually part of how/why her speech is misleading. Obamacare was not at all responsible for the deficit in 2009, and the total contribution to the $1.3 trillion deficit in 2010 was only $6 billion according to the Congressional Budget Office (see Table 1 in the linked document). The cost in 2010 of Obamacare was actually less than the cost of those 9,000 earmarks, although the earmarks were also not very expensive in the grand scheme of things, coming in at less than $8 billion.
Moreover, it is not at all clear whether the long-run net effect of Obamacare will be increased or decreased deficits. In its January 6 letter to Speaker Boehner, the CBO wrote, "CBO has not yet developed a detailed estimate of the budgetary impact of repealing [the March 2010 health care legislation], although it is working with the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation to complete such an estimate in the near future. … CBO and JCT estimated that the March 2010 health care legislation would reduce budget deficits over the 2010-2019 period and in subsequent years; consequently, we expect that repealing that legislation would increase budget deficits."
If there is a more recent CBO analysis, then I am not seeing it.
So, let's sum up. Bachmann incorrectly attributes the entire 2009 deficit to Obama, she incorrectly associates Obama with TARP and over-estimates its expense, she incorrectly associates the massive deficits of 2009 and 2010 with Obamacare, and despite not having firm numbers from the CBO that would support her claim (and preliminary numbers that actually refute her claim), she suggests that Obamacare could have a "devastating impact on our national debt for even generations to come."
Say what you want, but at this point it is clear to anyone who is being honest that Bachmann was intentionally misleading (aka lying) in her response to the state of the union.
And now, like Phil, I am bowing out. I have spent far too much time on this already.
Jonathan, I am not here to debate the merits of Obamacare, or to respond to your ad hominem attacks. You alternate between saying that Bachmann was technically correct and incorrect. If you want to blame things on Bachmann, then I suggest that you at least get your story straight.