Thursday, September 29, 2011

Meh

The Washington Post -- pthththht. Kessler hates the chart that would dare show that Obama didn't somehow magically increase the debt the way the right wing likes to pretend he did.

"But the biggest problem is that this is just dumb math. What really counts is not the raw debt numbers, but the size of the debt as a percentage of the gross domestic product."

Really? Dumb math? Maybe you could argue that's a methodological error. But the bad math accusation doesn't really hold water here. (There apparently had been a math error but Nancy Pelosi's office corrected it and that's reflected in the chart above.) The math is perfectly fine.

What they would like to see is a chart which shows debt as a percentage of GDP. Which, by wacky coincidence, makes Obama look bad (although it arguably makes Republicans look worse).
But the claims that Pelosi is somehow "cherry - picking" her data by insisting the data be cherry-picked even more is absurd. Yeah, if we put enough disclaimers on our charts (that it's "public" debt vs. gross debt) or add enough figures (debt as a portion of blonde-haired-children GDP) then I'm sure we can find numbers that will please the Tea Party.
But the fact is that the chart isn't bogus. 

No comments:

Post a Comment