What is Spinsanity? It's a Web site whose proprietors scrutinize statements by our political leaders, candidates, journalists, and pundits for honesty, fairness, and rhetorical soundness. Each week on the Commentary Page, the good folks at Spinsanity will restore sanity to the spin of statements from the right and the left. Today: the state of debate in the presidential campaigns.
Double-talk on deficit reduction
John Kerry has made cutting the deficit in half one of the centerpieces of his economic agenda. The Democratic presidential candidate has claimed in numerous appearances and interviews that, as he said in his acceptance speech at his party's convention last week, "our plan will cut the deficit in half in four years."
But while he may have such a goal, Kerry is inaccurate when he says his plan "will cut the deficit in half." As the Wall Street Journal noted in a news report last week, the senator's plan is missing the cost of a policy change he claims to support: fixing the alternative minimum tax (AMT) so that it doesn't affect middle-class taxpayers, which an Urban Institute economist estimated would cost $500 billion over the next 10 years. Kerry's plan also includes many vague promises, such as $300 billion in savings over 10 years from "cutting corporate welfare." In a study conducted earlier this year, the Washington Post found that Kerry's proposed spending exceeded the revenue that would be generated by his tax plan in the 2005-08 period by at least $165 billion.
Kerry's spin may sound familiar. That's because it's very similar to a phony plan President Bush has been touting that he claims will cut the deficit in half over the next four years. Like Kerry, the President reaches that goal only by omitting major costs, such as fixing the AMT and occupying and rebuilding Iraq and Afghanistan.
How do politicians, especially the President, get away with such dishonesty? As we show in our new book, the Bush White House has changed national politics by using dishonest public relations tactics to sell nearly all its major policies.
For example, Bush has repeatedly proclaimed from the stump this year that, as he put it on July 14, "first of all, we said, if you pay taxes, you're going to get relief. In other words, everybody that pays taxes should get tax relief... . The best way to provide fairness in tax relief is to reduce the rates of everybody who pays. And that's what happened, as you recall."
While the tax cut Bush successfully enacted in 2001 reduced rates for everyone who pays federal income taxes, it provided no benefits to the millions of Americans who pay payroll taxes as well as state and local taxes. By stripping the claim of qualification, Bush exaggerates how widely the benefits of the tax cut were distributed - the same tactic he used in selling his 2001 and 2003 tax cuts.
Bush and other White House officials have also misrepresented the number of stem-cell lines available for federally funded research, understated or ignored the impact of his tax cuts on the federal budget, distorted prewar intelligence about Iraq, and attempted to revise those prewar claims in the post-war debate, among many other examples.
Kerry has frequently taken a similar approach. For example, he and his campaign repeatedly misstated the number of jobs lost under President Bush by using private sector figures that exclude gains in the government sector. The sound bite that 3 million jobs had been lost was a frequent Kerry refrain, even after data disproving it based on private sector figures alone became available.
The campaign has also constructed phony statistics of a "Bush tax" and "middle-class misery index" based on hand-picked economic indicators, both of which echo Bush's misleading use of statistics in campaigning for his tax cuts. And early this year, it falsely accused Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R., Ga.) and Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie of questioning Kerry's patriotism when they actually criticized his record on defense issues.
President Bush has accelerated the communications wars beyond even Reagan and Clinton, and Sen. Kerry is posed to follow suit. As we enter the final stages of the general election, it's important to remember the consequences of the win-at-all-costs mentality that now pervades national politics. In the arms race of deception, citizens always lose.
Ben Fritz, Bryan Keefer and Brendan Nyhan are the editors of Spinsanity (
www.spinsanity.org). Their new book, "All the President's Spin: Geroge W. Bush, the Media and the Truth," has just been published. They can be reached at
feedback@spinsanity.org. Copyright 2004 by Ben Fritz, Bryan Keefer and Brendan Nyhan.
