You do the math
When I was in school learning about the difference between an average (or mean), where you add up the values of a bunch of items and then divide by the number of items, and a median, where you line up a bunch of items and find the value of the one in the middle, I always thought the median was sort of meaningless. What practical use would it ever have?
Watching President Bush's State of the Union tonight I thought, Oh, this is where medians come in handy.
I'm referring, of course, to the claim -- repeated yet again in the president's speech -- that his tax cut plan offers an "average" tax break of over $1000. "Ninety-two million Americans," Bush told us with a straight face, "will keep this year an average of almost $1,100 more of their own money."
This average is a convenient fiction; it's a statistic that exists only because the enormous benefits accruing to the dividend-owning super-rich skew the "average" -- and camouflage the fact that the cuts most middle class taxpayers will receive under Bush's proposal are piddling. The few rich taxpayers with mega-breaks are statistical "outliers"; if you used a median rather than an average you'd end up with a far lower number -- one much closer to what most of us would actually get under Bush's plan.
Now, this claim had already been widely debunked before the speech; I'm not breaking any news here. Paul Krugman put it most memorably when he wrote, "A liberal and a conservative were sitting in a bar. Then Bill Gates walked in. 'Hey, we're rich!' shouted the conservative. 'The average person in this bar is now worth more than a billion!'"
I guess I shouldn't be shocked at this late date that Bush and his administration would continue to use blatantly misleading "facts" to sell their policies; it's been their economic approach from day one. Still, it's appalling. And the very consistency of Bush's willingness to twist simple facts in demonstrably manipulative and sometimes outright deceitful ways has a more pernicious effect than simply discrediting his policies: It leaves us with the sense that the man is deeply untrustworthy.
I wouldn't buy a used car from anyone who I knew played so fast and loose with simple arithmetic -- let alone trust him on matters of life and death, war and peace. Unfortunately, the U.S. has already made its down payment.
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