By James D. Agresti
July 31, 2012

In the wake of the Dark Knight massacre in Aurora, Colorado, major media outlets and public figures have been making statements about guns and violence that do more to misinform than educate. Below are some of the most significant and common of these misleading assertions.

Fallacy # 1: Violence is a growing challenge

The Los Angeles Times published an article by Michael Memoli that begins by claiming that “President Obama vowed Wednesday night to ‘leave no stone unturned’ in seeking ways to curb the growing challenge of violence in American cities, including reasonable restrictions on gun ownership.”

The White House transcript shows that Obama didn’t say there was a growing challenge of violence in our cities, and rightfully so, because violence in the U.S. has been falling—not growing. For example, from 1990 to 2010 (latest FBI data), the nationwide murder rate dropped by 49% (see graph below). Furthermore, preliminary data for 2011 indicates that there were 1.9% fewer murders than in 2010, which saw the lowest murder rate in 45 years.

Fallacy # 2: Congress opposes banning military weapons

At a campaign event, President Obama stated that

steps to reduce violence have been met with opposition in Congress … particularly when it touches on the issues of guns. … [A] lot of gun owners would agree that AK-47s belong in the hands of soldiers, not in the hands of criminals—that they belong on the battlefield of war, not on the streets of our cities.

On the contrary, the AK-47s used on the “battlefield of war” are already banned. As detailed in the book Military Technology, the AK-47s used by the military are fully automatic weapons—otherwise known as machine guns—which can continuously fire bullets as long as the trigger is pulled. Federal law has strictly regulated such guns since 1934, and as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives explains, a 1968 law expanded the definition of what constitutes a machine gun, and a 1986 law outright banned the transfer or possession of machine guns except for those grandfathered under previous law.

The AK-47s that Obama wants to ban are semi-automatic guns that look like military weapons, but their inner workings are essentially the same as common guns owned by law-abiding citizens. Regardless of their appearance, semi-automatic guns fire one bullet each time the trigger is pulled, not a stream of bullets like a machine gun. External features (such as a protruding pistol grip, bayonet mount, and folding stock) were devised for functional reasons in machine guns, but these features generally don’t add to the deadliness of their semi-automatic look-alikes.

On the other hand, Obama’s statement is applicable to the fact that there is opposition in Congress to banning large capacity ammunition magazines, which can make semi-automatic guns more deadly because the shooter can consecutively fire more bullets without having to swap out a magazine, which takes about two to four seconds. Magazines that hold more than ten bullets were banned by a federal law from 1994-2004 with an exception for devices “lawfully possessed” before the law was enacted.

Among the three weapons used by the gunman in Aurora, Colorado, one had a 100-bullet magazine, which may have enabled him to get off more shots in less time, but this is presently uncertain because the gun apparently jammed. Nevertheless, whatever the facts of this incident prove to be, despite the President’s rhetoric, this was not a weapon that is “in the hands of soldiers.”

Fallacy # 3: The Colorado shooter used an assault rifle

Commentaries and articles published by the New York Times, NPR, Newsmax, USA Today, and countless other media outlets asserted that the Colorado gunman used an “assault rifle.” This is patently untrue. An assault rifle, as explained by the Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law, is a “rifle that is capable of being fired in fully automatic and semi-automatic modes, at the user’s option.”

Again, the gunman did not use a firearm that can be fired in fully automatic mode. Instead, he used an “assault weapon,” which per the AP Stylebook, is strictly “semi-automatic” and is “not synonymous with assault rifle.” This confusing distinction in terms is not by accident. The term “assault weapon,” which sounds like a synonym for “assault rifle,” was introduced into the gun control debate in the 1980′s and popularized with the expressed intent of confusing the public into thinking that certain semi-automatic guns are machine guns.

To wit, a search for “assault weapon” through Google Book produces no results that use this term in its modern context before 1988. In 1988, however, a gun control group published a booklet describing how the “new topic” of “assault weapons” will “strengthen the handgun restriction lobby for the following reasons:”

… The weapons’ menacing looks, coupled with the public’s confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons—anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun—can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons. …

The rest is history. Numerous politicians, journalists, activists, and commentators began using the term “assault weapon,” and in 1994, it was enshrined in a federal law. As Josh Sugermann, the author of the gun control pamphlet and the founder of the Violence Policy Center had hoped, the resultant confusion has been pervasive. Even the Associated Press—despite the instructions in its own stylebook—sometimes uses terms that are either technically inaccurate (like semiautomatic assault rifle) or that can easily feed the false impression that certain semi-automatic guns are machine guns (like military-style assault weapons).

The New York Public Library Writer’s Guide to Style and Usage states that “a writer should use jargon only when necessary and define it carefully. Where plain English serves equally well, it should be used instead.” This standard can be satisfied with a simple descriptor such as “semi-automatic rifle.” If the gun is equipped with a large capacity magazine, this is also pertinent and worthy of note, but beyond that, the superficial appearance of a semi-automatic gun is typically immaterial to how deadly it is.

Fallacy # 4: States with strict gun-control laws have less gun-related deaths

A Washington Post op-ed by Ezra Klein and a New York Times house editorial both affirmed that states with strict gun-control laws have less gun-related deaths. To support this claim, both cite an analysis by Richard Florida in The Atlantic.

The first problem with this analysis is that it characterizes states as having “stricter gun control legislation” if they have one of three gun laws in place: “assault weapons’ bans, trigger locks, or safe storage requirements.” Since trigger locks are a type of safe-storage requirement, this boils down to only two laws. By using this arbitrary method to identify states with strict gun control laws, more than half the states that meet this standard turn out to be right-to-carry states, which as a rule permit citizens to carry concealed firearms in public. Ironically, the Violence Policy Center uses right-to carry laws as a criterion to identify states with “weak gun laws.”

Second, even if we blindly accept such a haphazard classification system, the result of the analysis is meaningless because it measures only firearm deaths instead of all deaths. Hence, it accounts for murders committed with guns but fails to account for lives saved with guns (more on this below). The analysis also labors under an implicit assumption that suicides committed with guns would not be committed by any means simply because an assault weapons ban or safe storage law were not in place. This is questionable given that an analysis of firearms studies published in 2005 by the National Academies of Science concludes:

Some gun control policies may reduce the number of gun suicides, but they have not yet been shown to reduce the overall risk of suicide in any population.

Fallacy # 5: Guns are rarely used for self-defense

In a commentary published by CNN, David Frum, a CNN contributor and former speechwriter for George W. Bush, asserted that

a gun in the house is not a guarantee of personal security — it is instead a standing invitation to family tragedy. The cold dead hands from which they pry the gun are very unlikely to be the hands of a heroic minuteman defending home and hearth against intruders. They are much more likely to be the hands of a troubled adolescent or a clumsy child.

Like many issues in the field of social science, the question of how often guns are used for self-defense is surprisingly complicated. In the words of the above-cited National Academies of Science study, the

the data on defensive gun uses are … potentially error ridden. Without reliable information on the prevalence of defensive gun use, researchers are forced to make implausible and unsubstantiated assumptions about the accuracy of self-reported measures of resistance.

However, when counting only the bare minimum of defensive gun uses implied by the most rigorous surveys, the number of defensive gun uses far exceeds the number of violent crimes committed with guns.

For example, anti-gun researcher David McDowall and others conducted a major survey of defensive gun use that was published in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology in 2000. The authors did not take their survey results to their logical conclusions by using the common practice of weighting them, but when one does this to find what the results would be for a nationally representative survey sample, the results imply that U.S. civilians use guns to defend themselves and others from crime at least 989,883 times per year. This figure accounts only for “clear” cases of defensive gun use and is based upon a weighting calculation designed to minimize defensive gun uses.

Likewise, when one minimizes the defensive gun uses from a survey conducted by pro-gun researchers Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz that was published in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology in 1995, the results imply at least 1,029,615 defensive gun uses per year. For comparison, based upon survey data from the U.S. Department of Justice, roughly 436,000 violent crimes were committed by offenders visibly armed with a gun in 2008.

Fallacies abound

Public confusion regarding gun control and violence stems not only from the press but also from papers published in peer-reviewed journals. Under the guise of sophistication, academics can tinker with classifications, statistical methods, and other variables until they get the results they want. This is not to accuse most researchers of doing this, but to point out that this has happened on countless occasions, and it thus makes sense to examine raw data before it is subjected to statistical operations that open the doors to bias. For reams of such raw data, visit www.justfacts.com/guncontrol.asp.

By James D. Agresti
July 18, 2012

Two new studies are predicting accelerated sea-level rises on the East and West coasts of the United States, primarily due to global warming. Major media outlets—and in some ways the studies themselves—have painted a distorted picture of past, current, and future sea levels. In fact, the studies actually conflict with each other, a crucial fact that has gone unreported in news reports that have mentioned both of the studies.

One study, henceforth referred to as the “East Coast study,” was published in the journal Nature Climate Change and shows a “recent acceleration” of sea-level rise on the East Coast from North Carolina to Massachusetts. According to the Associated Press, “By 2100, scientists and computer models estimate that sea levels globally could rise as much as 3.3 feet,” and this study predicts that the East Coast could see “8 to 11 inches more” than this, hence “putting one of the world’s most costly coasts in danger of flooding….”

The other study, herein dubbed the “West Coast study,” was published by the National Research Council and publicized with a Los Angeles Times headline that reads “California sea levels to rise 5-plus feet this century, study says.”

Sensation versus information

First, a lesson in journalistic sensationalism: The AP’s claim about “scientists and computer models” predicting global sea-level rises by 2100 of “as much as 3.3 feet” could just as well have been worded “as little as 7 inches.” This 3.3 feet figure is not from the study that is the subject of the AP article, and by citing the authority of scientists and computer models, the AP gives the distinct impression that this result is universal. The reality, however, is that a 2011 paper in the Journal of Coastal Research explains that such projections run as low as 7 inches. An honest way to report this would have been to provide a range of estimates (such as 7 inches to 3.3 feet), not a single cherry-picked example.

The Los Angeles Times headline about the West Coast study—“California sea levels to rise 5-plus feet this century”—is even more misleading because the language is unequivocal. In truth, the study predicts a sea-level rise of 16.5 to 66 inches over this period. In the body of the article, the LA Times reporter walks back the headline and applies the qualifier “as much as” to the 5-plus-feet figure, but he fails to provide even a hint that this is the upper bound of a prediction that extends to as low as one fourth of this.

Reuters took the hyperbole a leap further by claiming that the East Coast study shows “sea levels from Cape Hatteras to Cape Cod are rising at a faster pace than anywhere on Earth.” This assertion appears to be completely fabricated. The study compares global average sea-level accelerations to those on the coastlines of the continental U.S. and southernmost portion of Canada. It says nothing about any other specific locations, and an email to one of the study’s authors confirms that the study “does not make comparisons ‘to anywhere on earth’.”

Methods versus results

Second, a lesson in scientific conflict: The East Coast study found that the Northeast is a “hotspot” of sea-level acceleration, and the authors extrapolated recent historical data to calculate that sea levels in New York City will rise faster than the global average. However, in contrast, the study found that on the West Coast, all sea-level accelerations are either zero or negative (see Figure 2 and Supplementary Figure S3).

Yet, the West Coast study extrapolated “recent data into the future” to calculate that California sea levels will rise faster than the global average. In other words, if the scientists who performed the West Coast study used the same logic, data, and methods as used in the East Coast study, they would have projected that California sea levels will rise the same or less than the global average. Instead, they predicted the opposite.

As detailed below, the East Coast study contains two projections, one of which predicts that sea levels in New York City will rise a total of 15 to 18 inches over the 21st century. Again, the West Coast study projects that sea levels in California will rise 15 to 66 inches over the same period. If the studies’ projections were consistent with each other, there is no way that the cold spot of California could rise dramatically faster than the hotspot of New York City. This inconsistency reveals how the results of such projections are dependent upon the methods that scientists choose to employ.

Predictions versus history

Third, a lesson in forecasting: During the 20th century, the average global sea level rose by about 7 inches, and if this trend continues, sea level obviously will rise by another 7 inches in the 21st century. Some scientists, however, are predicting multiplicative increases in this rate. The problem with these predictions is that such increases have never been observed. As the West Coast study states, “Increases of 3–4 times the current rate would be required to realize scenarios of 1 m [3.3 feet] sea-level rise by 2100. Such an acceleration has not yet been detected.”

Projections of future sea levels are often based upon computer models, and the results of such models are frequently cited in the press without any qualifications about their uncertainty. However, as explained in the academic text Flood Geomorphology:

[T]rue science is concerned with understanding nature no matter what the methodology. In our view, if the wrong equations are programmed because of inadequate understanding of the system, then what the computer will produce, if believed by the analyst, will constitute the opposite of science.

The earth’s climate and oceans are extremely complex systems, and computer models predicting unprecedented accelerations in sea level are venturing into a realm of speculation that may prove to be the opposite of true science, regardless of the fact that it is scientists who program these models. Scientists often place appropriate disclaimers in their papers to convey this uncertainty, but these qualifiers rarely make it into the press coverage, leaving readers with the illusion that the results are more solid than they actually are.

Impressions versus realities

Fourth and most importantly, a lesson in political science: The official press release for the East Coast study states that “rates of sea level rise are increasing three-to-four times faster along portions of the U.S. Atlantic Coast than globally.” This language is easily misconstrued, and this is exactly what has occurred in many news reports. In the context of this study, the word “faster” refers to sea-level acceleration, not to sea-level rise. Yet, Reuters, for example, reported that “sea levels in this corridor were rising between three and four times faster than the global average.” This is simply not true.

This confusion between rise and acceleration has major implications because the global sea-level acceleration calculated in this study is so close to zero that even a tiny acceleration is large by comparison. The global acceleration (a sea-level rate difference of 0.59±0.26 mm per year over a 60-year period) equates to a grand total of about 0.4 to 1.0 inches of additional sea-level rise over 60 years.

In fact, global sea-level accelerations are so close to zero that they can be positive, zero, or negative depending upon the timeframe that scientists analyze. The above-mentioned 2011 paper in the Journal of Coastal Research reviews the results of numerous sea-level acceleration studies and concludes that there is “disagreement” over whether acceleration can “be detected.” Even the East Coast study, which is entitled “Hotspot of accelerated sea-level rise on the Atlantic coast of North America,” found that acceleration in this hotspot is “dependent on time-series length” and is “not significantly different from zero” for windows longer than 72 years.

The press release for the East Coast study mentions none of these critical facts, but it includes an unsupported assertion that isn’t even from the study, which is that “global sea level has been projected to rise roughly two-to-three feet or more by the end of the 21st century.” In conjunction with this, the press release adds another easily misconstrued statement:

During the 21st century, the increases in sea level rise rate that have already occurred in the hotspot will yield increases in sea level of 8 to 11.4 inches by 2100. This regional sea level increase would be in addition to components of global sea level rise.

Based upon these claims, one might conclude that the study predicts a sea-level rise in the Northeast of two-to-three feet plus 8 to 11 inches, which amounts to 32–46 inches. This is not the case, but one would never know it unless he or she took the time to scrutinize the study and a 25-page file of supplementary information. These documents show that the “components of global sea level rise” mentioned in the press release are not all components but some components. This means that one cannot add together the sea-level rise figures provided in the press release without double-counting some of the projected rise.

The press release could have cited another projection from the study that is very easily understood, which is that the total projected sea-level rise for New York City during the 21st century is 15 to 18 inches. This is less than half of what could be construed from the press release. However, one can’t find this projection even by reading the entire study because it was relegated to the very last page of the supplementary information. Moreover, the description of this projection is separated by 16 pages from the actual numerical result, making it difficult to put the two together.

Along the same lines, the West Coast study’s press release states that “San Francisco International Airport could flood with as little as 40 [16 inches] centimeters of sea-level rise, a value that could be reached in several decades.” What the press release fails to mention is that sea levels in San Francisco actually declined by 6 inches between 1992 and 2010.

Public versus private

Finally, a lesson in double standards. The East Coast study concludes with a statement that the “authors declare no competing financial interests.” The journal that published this study defines such interests as “those of a financial nature that” could potentially influence “the objectivity, integrity or perceived value of a publication.” Yet, the authors of East Coast study are employed by the U.S. Geological Survey, which is a federal agency funded by tax dollars. This could certainly be described as a competing financial interest given that federal government stands to reap trillions of dollars through global warming legislation.

Tellingly, Obama administration Treasury Department documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act describe “emissions allowances under a cap and trade system” as “valuable assets” that are “analogous to revenue under an equivalent tax policy.” These documents specify that such legislation “could generate federal receipts” ranging from $100 to $300 billion every year.

If the scientists who conducted these studies worked for an oil company, the academic community would require them to declare this as a competing interest, and the press would mention it in every story that cited the study. Why should the standard be any different for scientists funded by governments?

Five lessons but no answer

So, will global warming flood the coasts of the United States? Despite what many media outlets and some scientists would lead us to believe, no one really knows. What we do know, however, is that a number of previous claims that global warming will cause flooding, starvation, and extreme weather have thus far proven unfounded.

By James D. Agresti
June 22, 2012

The 2012 Social Security Trustees Report—the authoritative source on the program’s finances—states that the program’s “trust fund assets” will “continue to grow” through 2020, a claim that has been repeated by numerous sources as varied as US News & World Report, the AFL-CIO, and the American Academy of Actuaries. However, as revealed by data buried deeper in the 252-page Trustees Report, this assertion disregards the effects of inflation, which are projected to overrun any expected trust fund gains and contribute to an accelerating decline that will start in 2013.

Making financial claims that fail to account for inflation, per the Journal of Accountancy, “does not deliver a message that is completely true and fair.” Likewise, the textbook Cost Accounting: Principles And Practice states that “inflation accounting presents a true and correct view of the financial state of affairs of a firm,” and the academic serial work Quantitative Investing for the Global Markets affirms that “we should be concerned not with nominal quantities [i.e., those not adjusted for inflation] but with real ones.”

In 2010, for the first time in 25 years, Social Security’s expenses exceeded its income from payroll taxes and taxes on Social Security benefits. This state of affairs continued in 2011 and is projected to continue every year into the foreseeable future. Nonetheless, Social Security has two other source of income: transfers from the general fund of the Treasury (like those required under the 2011 and 2012 payroll tax holidays) and interest that the program receives from its trust fund, which is comprised of Treasury bonds.

The transfers from the general fund of the Treasury are allegedly temporary and represent a gift to the Social Security program mainly financed by income, corporate, and excise taxes. On the other hand, the interest on the trust fund primarily stems from previous surpluses of Social Security taxes that were loaned to the Treasury. As recently as two years ago, this interest was supposed to keep the trust fund growing for a decade after Social Security’s expenses began exceeding its tax income.

In 2010, Social Security’s Office of the Chief Actuary projected that this interest income would keep the trust fund growing in real value through 2020. The 2011 projections moved this date to 2018, and the recently released 2012 projections pushed the date to 2012, meaning that the trust fund will start declining in real value next year. After 2013, the trust fund is projected to decline by greater amounts each year until becoming exhausted in 2033.

After 2033, Social Security’s projected shortfalls could be covered by increasing payroll taxes by 33% starting in 2033 and rising slightly thereafter. These deficits could also be covered by reducing benefits by 24% starting in 2033.

There are several other ways of expressing the program’s expected shortfalls. One measure commonly cited by the press is the 75-year open group unfunded obligation, which amounts to $8.6 trillion. This represents the money that must be immediately added to the trust fund to cover projected shortfalls for the next 75 years. To give this figure some context, it is equivalent to 10.7 times the total income for Social Security in 2011 or an additional $54,500 from every person who paid Social Security payroll taxes in 2011.

The open group unfunded obligation, however, does not provide a full accounting of Social Security’s commitments. According to the Treasury Department’s Financial Report of the United States Government, this metric “understates financial needs by capturing relatively more of the revenues from current and future workers and not capturing all of the benefits that are scheduled to be paid to them.” A measure that accounts for this is the closed group unfunded obligation, which reveals how much money must be immediately added to the trust fund to cover the projected shortfalls for all current taxpayers and beneficiaries in the Social Security program. This approximates the method by which publicly traded companies are required by law to report the finances of their pension and retirement plans, and it currently amounts to $21.6 trillion or an additional $136,900 from every person who paid Social Security payroll taxes in 2011.

Even the closed group unfunded obligation assumes a proactive approach to Social Security’s looming deficits. If, instead, we continue on our current path and just borrow the money to fund these programs, the shortfall will amount to an additional $276,000 (in 2012 dollars) for every person expected to be paying Social Security taxes in 2086.

It also bears noting that all of the measures described above may be optimistic because they are based upon the Social Security’s Administration’s intermediate assumptions, which have proven to be far more positive than actual outcomes.

By James D. Agresti and Dustin Siggins
June 15, 2012
Revised 11/8/12

If the U.S. government continues with its current tax and spending policies, children born this year will be saddled with a crippling publicly held debt that is more than twice the size of Japan’s by the time they turn 30 years old. This grim picture, projected by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in its newly published annual long-term budget outlook, expects U.S. publicly held debt to grow from 73% of GDP by the end of 2012 to 247% of GDP by 2042.

Worse still, the CBO projects that current policies will continue to drive the U.S. deeper into debt, and by the time today’s newborns reach 38 years of age in 2050, the major federal healthcare programs and Social Security will consume all federal revenues, leaving nothing for any other function of federal government or even interest payments on the national debt.

Despite this ominous forecast, prominent economist and former Obama advisor Jared Bernstein is declaring that we don’t need to reform Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, or “government’s other critical functions” in order to prevent an “explosive” debt that “swamps the economy.” Bernstein says “it is well within our means” to reduce the national debt by following the “broad outlines” of current law, “meaning all the Bush tax cuts expire, for example.”

When the CBO makes long-term budget projections, it typically projects two scenarios informally called “current law” and “current policy.” Current policy is what the federal government is actually doing, whereas current law is what is on the books. These are dramatically different because Congresses and Presidents have enacted tax and spending laws that don’t account for inflation or wage growth, expire in the future, or become effective in the future. Bernstein suggests that we stick with the current law to solve the looming debt catastrophe.

While Bernstein concedes that some elements of current law may be “unrealistic” in the short-term, he insists “there’s no reason” we can’t follow this plan for the long-term and those who ignore this approach “are doing so not for substantive, but for ideological reasons.”

Bernstein describes his proposal for taming the debt by saying that the “Bush tax cuts would all have to eventually sunset, and we’d need to continue – and ramp up – what looks like early progress on slowing the growth of health care spending.” Although this description is based upon CBO’s projections, Bernstein misrepresents these projections by whitewashing the details of the path he advocates. In truth, it would involve far more expense and sacrifice than he reveals.

Under current law, the good news is that publicly held debt drops from 73% of GDP today to 0% by 2069. This is a vast improvement over just last year when the CBO projected that the publicly held debt would be 75% of GDP in 2069 (this is partly due to the changes in law, but most of the improvement is attributable to CBO’s altered assumptions about future economic and demographic circumstances). The bad news, however, is that the following will also occur:

• federal taxes will perpetually consume a greater share of the U.S. economy, rising to 21% higher than the average of the past 40 years by 2025, 40% higher by 2045, 57% higher by 2065, and 66% higher by 2085. The CBO explains that this incessant tax growth occurs because “most parameters of the tax code are not indexed for real income growth, and some are not indexed for inflation.” As an example, the typical married couple with two children earning the median income of $96,200 will see their income and payroll taxes steadily rise from 13% of their income today to 24% over the next 25 years—an 85% increase.

• Medicare payments for physician services will be cut by 27% starting in 2013, bringing Medicare payment rates down to Medicaid levels. These payment rates have caused substantial problems for patients trying to get access to doctors. These Medicare cuts will increase in subsequent years and then be deepened by Medicare cuts in the Affordable Care Act.

• spending on all federal programs but Social Security and the major healthcare programs will decrease from 12.1% of GDP in 2012 to 7.9% of GDP over the next 25 years—a 35% reduction. This includes programs such as national defense, food stamps, other nutrition programs, unemployment, veterans’ benefits, federal employee retirement benefits, transportation, and education.

The specifics above paint a much fuller and far different picture than Bernstein’s sanitized description of the path he would have us take. It also bears nothing that this is an optimistic scenario because it does not account for the prospect of future severe recessions or major wars, which the CBO acknowledges “will probably” occur and “will probably cause significant and persistent worsening of the budget outlook relative to the projections contained in this report.” These projections also “omit the impact” that higher taxes “would have on people’s incentives to work and save,” and as the CBO explains, these higher tax rates will discourage “many taxpayers” from working and saving.

Like Bernstein, Ezra Klein of the Washington Post has also supported this plan and grossly understated its downsides, calling it the “do nothing” plan. Media Matters for America recently did the same while incorporating significant factual errors into its analysis.

Could we tame the debt in the way Bernstein and Co. claim? Yes, but if Congress and the President do nothing, drastically higher taxes and deep cuts to wide-ranging government programs are also a part of the scenario. Rather than ignore this reality, those who support the “do nothing” plan should candidly argue their case instead of masking how this proposal would impact the nation.

The data cited above is available in this spreadsheet.  This article is also posted at Hot Air, which is the primary publisher.

James D. Agresti is the president of Just Facts, a nonprofit institute dedicated to researching and publishing verifiable facts about public policy. Dustin Siggins is a policy/politics blogger and the co-author of a forthcoming book on the national debt with William Beach of the Heritage Foundation.

NOTE (11/8/2012): An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that “the typical married couple with two children earning the median income of $96,200 will see their income and payroll taxes steadily rise from 13% of their income today to 24% over the next 25 years—an 85% increase.” Today’s rate is actually 14% (not 13%), which equates to a 71% increase.

By James D. Agresti
May 29, 2012
Corrected 6/15/12

With the urging of environmental groups backed by the celebrity firepower of actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus, the city of Los Angles banned plastic supermarket bags last week. The law received added support from the Los Angeles Times, which published a house editorial encouraging the city council to enact the ban. Without presenting any quantitative evidence, the editors wrote that plastic bags pose a “huge cost to the environment” and that reusable totes and paper bags are “better options.” Unsupported claims to this effect are widespread in the press and among advocacy groups, but they are at odds with scientific data.

In 2011, the United Kingdom’s Environment Agency released a study that evaluated nine categories of environmental impacts caused by different types of supermarket bags. The study found that paper bags have a worse effect on the environment than plastic bags in all nine impact categories, which include global warming potential, abiotic depletion, acidification, eutrophication, human toxicity, fresh water aquatic ecotoxicity, marine aquatic ecotoxicity, terrestrial ecotoxicity, and photochemical oxidation.

Furthermore, the study found that the average supermarket shopper would have to reuse the same cotton tote from 94 up to 1,899 times before it had less environmental impact than the disposable plastic bags needed to carry the same amount of groceries. This wide-varying amount of reuse that is required until the breakeven point is reached depends upon the type of environmental impact, but the median is 314 times, and it is more than 170 times for all but one of the 9 impact categories.

For example, a shopper would need to reuse the same cotton tote 350 times before it caused less fresh water aquatic ecotoxicity than all of the plastic bags that it would replace over this period. Given the improbability that the same cotton tote would last that long (its expected life is 52 reuses), in most cases plastic bags will have less environmental impact.

Why is this? Because the environmental impacts of supermarket bags are dominated by the energy and raw materials needed to manufacture them. Plastic bags are inexpensive because relatively small amounts of energy and raw materials are needed to make them. These same attributes that make plastic bags affordable and light also make them easier on the environment than alternatives like paper bags and reusable cotton totes.

Critics of plastic bags frequently argue that they “take hundreds of years to decompose,” and the LA Times editors advance this storyline by showing a picture of a dump with a caption that reads, “ENDURING: A plastic grocery store bag lies amid the trash at a Calabasas landfill.” Such logic ignores reality in two key respects.

First, modern-day landfills are generally benign because they have composite liners, clay caps, and runoff collections systems. As explained in a 1999 paper in the Journal of Environmental Engineering, modern landfills have “minimum odor nuisance,” “pose few problems after they are closed,” and “are a tribute to sanitary engineering.” Moreover, after being closed, landfills can be used for parks, commercial development, golf courses, nature conservatories, ski slopes, and airfields.

Second, even organic materials in landfills commonly take hundreds of years to decompose. Many people are ill-informed of this fact because of websites like WikiAnswers, corporations like Disney, major media outlets like CBS—and because they have been misled about this subject since their youth. Such misinformation flows from educational resources like the Environmental Education Exchange’s middle school curriculum on recycling, which states that paper bags take about a month to decompose in a landfill. Nearly the same content appears on EducationWorld.com, which has been honored by Apple, Microsoft, and Encyclopedia Britannica as one the world’s top education resources. These resources invoke the credibility of unidentified “scientists” to support this claim about paper bags and similar claims about other organic materials, but the scientific facts prove otherwise.

A study of landfills sponsored by the University of Arizona found that the tightly compacted contents of landfills create low-oxygen environments that inhibit decomposition. The details of the study were published in the book, Rubbish: The Archaeology of Garbage (2001), which explains that:

• “the dynamics of a landfill are very nearly the opposite of what most people think.”
• landfills “are not vast composters; rather, they are vast mummifiers.”
• “almost all the organic material” from the 1950s in a Phoenix landfill “remained readily identifiable: Pages from coloring books were still clearly that, onion parings were onion parings, carrot tops were carrot tops.”
• much of the organic material in an ancient Roman landfill that was twenty centuries old had not fully decomposed.

Up until the second century A.D., most literature was written on papyrus, an organic paper-like product. Papyrus is very vulnerable to moisture and deteriorates quickly when handled, but some of these documents survived thousands of years to the present era simply because they were deposited in landfills and thus shielded from decay. Like disposable plastic bags, reusable cotton bags wind up in landfills at the end of their useful lives and will likely be intact hundreds or thousands of years from now.

Another common talking point about supermarket plastic bags is that they are rarely recycled, but this argument ignores the fact that a large portion of supermarket plastic bags (40% in the U.K.) are reused as garbage pail liners. Interestingly, the U.K. study found that it is better for the environment to reuse these bags as garbage pail liners rather than recycle them. This is due to the environmental “benefits of avoiding the production of the bin liners they replace.”

Environmental impact studies can sometimes produce conflicting results, but Just Facts is unaware of any evidence that would overturn the general findings of the U.K. study. The study may even understate the environmental impacts of reusable cotton totes because it doesn’t account for regularly washing them, which is recommended because they can harbor dangerous bacteria from meat drippings and other foods.

The study did find that with moderate reuse, plastic totes made from polypropylene are better for the environment than disposable plastic bags, but this doesn’t negate the fact that standard plastic bags are a more environmentally friendly choice than so-called green alternatives like paper bags and reusable cotton totes. Thus, when governments outlaw plastic bags to “improve the environment,” they actually create more pollution.

By James D. Agresti, Levi Morehouse, and Anna Harrington
May 24, 2012

In stark contrast to a CBS News report declaring that Mitt Romney pays a “lower tax rate than most Americans,” a detailed analysis conducted by Just Facts and the accounting firm Ceterus has found just the opposite to be true. Romney’s federal tax rate is somewhere in the range of 29% to 82% higher than middle-class Americans, who in turn, pay appreciably higher tax rates than those with lower incomes.

Romney’s 2010 personal tax return itemizes $3,009,766 in federal taxes on an income of $21,646,507, which equates to a 13.9% tax rate. Based upon this figure, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reports that Romney paid

a far lower [tax] rate than the average American paid, as his fortune is mainly based on investment and not salaried income.

AFP makes this claim without even citing the tax rate paid by average Americans, and the CBS News story suffers from the same flaw. In reality, the 13.9% rate calculated from Romney’s tax return is very close to the federal tax burden for middle-class households, which is 14.3%. This figure comes from the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO’s) most recent estimates of effective federal tax rates, which show that in 2007, households in the middle 20% of the U.S. income distribution earned an average of $64,500 and paid 14.3% of this in federal taxes.

However, the 13.9% tax rate calculated from Romney’s tax return cannot be used to draw an apples-to-apples comparison with CBO’s estimate of a 14.3% tax rate for middle-class Americans. This is because CBO’s estimate also includes the burden of certain hidden taxes that don’t appear on Romney’s personal tax return.

Hidden taxes are primarily comprised of excise taxes (which are built into the prices of products like gas and alcohol) and corporate taxes (which are disbursed by corporations but are ultimately borne by stockholders, employees, and consumers). As the CBO has explained, “the ultimate cost of a tax or fee is not necessarily borne by the entity that writes the check to the government.” Thus, CBO accounts for these hidden taxes in their estimates of effective tax burdens.

Since the 13.9% rate for Romney is based only upon his personal tax return and excludes the hidden taxes that he paid, drawing an accurate comparison with the CBO data requires accounting for Romney’s excise and corporate taxes. A simple approximation of these taxes can be made as follows:

• Excise taxes: CBO estimates that households in the upper 1% of income only pay about 0.1% of their income in excise taxes. (Because excise taxes are levied on goods and services, they are typically a very small portion of high earners’ incomes.)
• Corporate payroll taxes: Romney is self-employed, and hence, his corporate payroll taxes are shown on his personal tax return under his self-employment taxes.
• Corporate income taxes: CBO estimates that the upper 1% of income earners pay an average of 8.8% in corporate income taxes.

Tallying the data above indicates that Romney’s federal tax rate is 22.8% (13.9% + 0.1% + 8.8%), which is 60% higher than middle-class Americans. This figure, however, should be fine-tuned because Romney’s income is in an upper tier of the upper 1% and because CBO makes some simplifying assumptions about corporate taxes that can be more accurately estimated by examining Romney’s tax return.

A detailed estimate

The complexities of the U.S. tax code make it practically impossible to determine Romney’s exact tax burden. Even CBO’s estimates are based on suppositions that leave room for uncertainty. Nonetheless, a comprehensive estimate based upon known facts is presented below.

First, Romney’s excise tax rate is probably close to zero. Per the CBO, “The effect of excise taxes, relative to income, is greatest for lower-income households, which tend to spend a greater proportion of their income on such goods as gasoline, alcohol, and tobacco, which are subject to excise taxes.” Given that the upper 1% of income earners made an average of $1.9 million in 2007 while paying a 0.1% excise tax rate, the rate on Romney’s earnings of $21.6 million should be vanishingly small.

Calculating Romney’s corporate income tax burden is more complicated because:

• certain capital gains and dividends (such as those from municipal bonds) are not subject to corporate income taxes.
• although the basic corporate income tax rate is 35%, tax preferences (such as those for manufacturers and those for green energy companies) make the effective rate 27% while spreading this tax burden unevenly.
• uncertainty exists about how the burden of corporate income taxes is distributed among stockholders, employees, and customers. As the CBO has explained, “households bear the burden of corporate income taxes, although the extent to which they do so as owners of capital [stockholders], as workers, or as consumers is not clear.”

Thus, each investor’s corporate income tax burden is dependent upon the nature of his or her portfolio and the portion of corporate income tax borne by stockholders. Estimates for this last variable range from nearly 100% down to 33%. For a 1998 survey published in the Journal of Economic Literature, researchers asked economists at leading U.S. universities to estimate the “percentage of the current corporate income tax in the United States that is ultimately borne by capital.” The median response was 40%.

Based upon the facts above and the details of Romney’s personal tax return, Just Facts and Ceterus calculate that Romney paid somewhere between 18.4% and 26.0% of his 2010 income in federal taxes (Excel file). This amounts to a 29% to 83% higher rate than CBO’s equivalent figure for middle-class Americans.

Correspondingly, the following graph, which is constructed with CBO data, shows that the top 20% of income earners pay markedly higher tax rates than all other income groups, and middle-class Americans pay appreciably higher tax rates than those with lower incomes:

James D. Agresti is the president of Just Facts, a nonprofit institute dedicated to researching and publishing verifiable facts about public policy. Levi Morehouse and Anna Harrington are CPAs with Ceterus, Inc., a leading provider of outsourced accounting services across the United States.

By James D. Agresti
May 9, 2012

Writing for the Wall Street Journal, economics reporter Justin Lahart declares that “sharp cuts in state and local government spending in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and the layoffs those cuts wrought” may be a reason behind the “persistently high” unemployment rate.

This cannot possibly be the case because there were no sharp cuts in spending. According to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), which provides the “only comprehensive estimates of state and local government [fiscal] activity available on a timely basis,” state and local government spending grew by 6.6% from 2008 through 2011. During this same period, the consumer price index for all items grew by 4.4%, which means that state and local government spending expanded faster than the rate of inflation.

Likewise, if government spending is measured as a percentage of the nation’s gross domestic product, state and local government spending increased by 0.9% over this period, although it peaked in 2009 and decreased by 2.3% between 2009 and 2011. It is impossible to determine from the article if Lahart is using such a measure because he provides no data to support this claim. Regardless, a 2.3% decline in this context hardly qualifies as “sharp,” especially since by the same measure, spending rose by 7.0% in the two years prior to this.

Similar to Lahart, Floyd Norris, the chief financial correspondent of the New York Times, reported last week:

For the first time in 40 years, the government sector of the American economy has shrunk during the first three years of a presidential administration. Spending by the federal government, adjusted for inflation, has risen at a slow rate under President Obama. But that increase has been more than offset by a fall in spending by state and local governments, which have been squeezed by weak tax receipts.

Norris uses BEA data to support these assertions, but he fails to tell his readers that his definition of government spending excludes a host of major government programs, such as unemployment benefits, food stamps, and Social Security (credit belongs to Morgen Richmond and Dustin Siggins at Hot Air for bringing this to attention).

More specifically, Norris equates government spending with “real gross domestic product for the government.” However, as the BEA has explained, “Total spending by government is much larger than the spending included in GDP” because “transfer payments and interest payments are excluded” from this measure. Transfer payments, by the way, include items such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, foreign aid, and United Nations support (“A Primer on BEA’s Government Accounts,” page 34).

Going back to at least 2010, commentators such as Paul Krugman of the New York Times have been making misleading statements about government spending. Others are doing the same by using unsupported assertions, redefining government spending to exclude large portions of it, and cherry-picking misrepresentative baselines from which to make calculations.

Hence, to accurately convey the realities of this issue, Just Facts is providing raw data and graphs for federal, state, and local government spending from 1990 through 2011. These graphs (below) express spending as a percentage of GDP because debates about the size of government are often centered upon how much of a nation’s economy is consumed by government and because this measure accounts for population changes and some of the effects of inflation/deflation. However, for reasons detailed in a Just Facts Radio episode entitled “Fathoming the National Debt,” readers should be aware that this measure inherently favors advocates of higher government spending.

By James D. Agresti
April 17, 2012

Today, the Los Angeles Times published a house editorial claiming it is “baseless hype” that Obama wants to restrict gun rights. In particular, the editors criticize statements by the NRA and Mitt Romney that Obama is anti-gun and plans to undermine the Second Amendment through his Supreme Court appointments. To refute these allegations, the editors write that Obama:

• “has rarely mentioned the topic.”
• “hasn’t proposed any anti-gun legislation in his first term.”
• “supported” the Supreme Court’s ruling in D.C. v Heller, which upheld an individual right to bear arms.

All of these statements have an element of truth but are misleading by virtue of what is left unsaid. Though the president has rarely mentioned gun control in public, the Washington Post has reported the following about a meeting between leading gun control advocates Jim and Sarah Brady and Obama’s press secretary:

During the meeting, President Obama dropped in and, according to Sarah Brady, brought up the issue of gun control, “to fill us in that it was very much on his agenda,” she said.

“I just want you to know that we are working on it,” Brady recalled the president telling them. “We have to go through a few processes, but under the radar.”

In keeping with an under-the-radar approach, Obama voiced support for the Supreme Court’s ruling in D.C. v Heller (which was decided by a tight 5-4 margin) while he:

• appointed a Supreme Court Justice (Sonia Sotomayor) who joined in an opinion declaring that “the use of arms for private self-defense does not warrant federal constitutional protection from state regulation,” and the Framers of the Constitution “did not write the Second Amendment in order to protect a private right of armed self-defense.”
• appointed another Supreme Court Justice (Elena Kagan) who recommend denying an appeal hearing for someone convicted of violating Washington, D.C.’s gun laws because, in her words, the man’s “sole contention is that the District of Columbia’s firearms statutes violate his constitutional right to ‘keep and bear arms.’ I’m not sympathetic.”

Furthermore, as a U.S. senator, Obama voted against the nomination of two justices who ruled in favor of an individual right to bear arms in D.C v Heller, and he also identified two other justices who ruled this way as people he would not have nominated to the Supreme Court. Obama didn’t say that gun control was as a reason he opposed any of these nominations, but nonetheless, if the president had his way, 4 of the 5 justices who ruled in favor of Heller would not have been on the Supreme Court.

Congruently, during the 2008 presidential race, Politico uncovered two candidate position questionnaires from Obama’s 1996 campaign for the Illinois state Senate. In both questionnaires, the question was posed, “Do you support state legislation to ban the manufacture, sale and possession of handguns?” In both cases, the answer was “Yes.”

When these questionnaires became public, Obama’s campaign asserted that a staffer filled them out and some of the replies did not and do not reflect Obama’s views. However, an investigation by Politico found that one of the questionnaires contains written notes that appear to be in Obama’s hand, and the other questionnaire has a cover sheet indicating that Obama supplied the answers in a face-to-face interview at the house of a board member of the organization that issued the questionnaire. The board member has confirmed that Obama personally sat for this interview.

Additionally, two years later on July 2, 1998, Obama or one of his aides submitted a candidate position questionnaire advocating a “ban” on the “sale or transfer of all forms of semi-automatic weapons.”

Obama has publicly expressed support for gun rights since he began running for president, stating in 2008 that “I won’t take your handgun away” and “I believe in people’s lawful right to bear arms.” Nevertheless, Obama’s Supreme Court appointments, Senate votes, and reported statements to Jim and Sarah Brady are consistent with his previously declared agenda to restrict gun rights.

By James D. Agresti
April 12, 2012

Speaking last week from the White House Rose Garden, President Obama made the following remarks about the pending Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Act:

Ultimately, I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.

And I’d just remind conservative commentators that for years what we’ve heard is the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint, that an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law.

In this statement, Obama describes judicial activism as a court striking down a law. This may be Obama’s view of judicial activism, but it is not the typical view of “conservative commentators” to whom he ascribes it. The phrase “judicial activism,” as explained in a California Law Review paper, has “many distinct and even contradictory meanings.” Obama’s description accords with one of these meanings, but this is not the form of judicial activism generally criticized by conservatives.

Conservatives have repeatedly described judicial activism as judges elevating their personal views over the Constitution or the law. At its core, this is the mindset verbalized by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, a liberal icon who mentored Obama’s newest Supreme Court appointee, Elena Kagen. When Marshall was asked to describe his judicial philosophy, he responded, “You do what you think is right and let the law catch up.”

In contrast, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas articulated a directly opposing view of judicial philosophy in a speech to the American Enterprise Institute, a prominent conservative think tank:

If we are to be a nation of laws and not of men, judges must be impartial referees who defend constitutional principles from attempts by particular interests—or even the people as a whole—to overwhelm them.

This echoes the sentiments of James Madison, the primary author of the Bill of Rights, and the person known as the “Father of the Constitution” for his central role in its formation. Near the outset of the Constitutional Convention, Madison vowed that it was the duty of the convention to frame a system of government that would protect “the rights of the minority” from the “common interest or passion” of the majority. This principle is what distinguishes the United States from a pure democracy in which anything goes if the majority wants it.

Liberals also stake claim to this tenet but assert that judges should flexibly interpret the Constitution in the light of evolving circumstances. In the words of liberal Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer:

I tend to emphasize purpose and consequences. Others emphasize language, a more literal reading of the text, history and tradition—believing that those help you reach a more objective answer.

Contrastingly, conservatives support the view that the Constitution should be interpreted in the light of its original intent, and changes to this intent should be made only by amendment. In the words of conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia:

What distinguishes the rule of law from the dictatorship of a shifting Supreme Court majority is the absolutely indispensable requirement that judicial opinions be grounded in consistently applied principle.

Given such highly divergent judicial philosophies, it is only natural that liberals and conservatives would have different views of what constitutes judicial activism. However, irrespective of how one defines the term, it is misleading to ascribe any one of these views to others who don’t hold it, which is precisely what the president did.

By James D. Agresti
March 29, 2012

After a live microphone captured President Obama asking Russian President Medvedev to transmit a message to Vladimir Putin that it is “important for him to give me space” on missile defense until after the upcoming election, “Obama avowed that he is not hiding his intentions from the American people:

The only way I get this stuff done is if I’m consulting with the Pentagon, with Congress, if I’ve got bipartisan support. And frankly, the current environment is not conducive to those kinds of thoughtful consultations. This is not a matter of hiding the ball.

Contrary to this assertion, the president has authority as the Commander in Chief of the U.S. military to make unilateral decisions about many aspects of missile defense. Obama did this in 2009 when he decided to cancel U.S. plans to deploy missile interceptors in Poland, a decision that Putin praised as “very right and brave.”

Casting further doubt on Obama’s explanation, his remark to Medvedev—“This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility”—conveys that he will not be as concerned with the political consequences of any actions he will take after the election.

Many media outlets are reporting on this incident without offering significant context about the involved parties and their records on missile defense. Thus, Just Facts is providing a chronological list of facts regarding these matters:

* In 2001, Obama told a Chicago television station, “I, for example, don’t agree with a missile defense system.” (Video)

* In 2007, Obama made a videotaped statement for an organization opposed to missile defense, declaring that, “As president,” “I will cut investments in unproven missile defense systems. I will not weaponize space. I will slow our development of future combat systems.” (Video)

* On November 8, 2008 (4 days after Obama’s election), Obama’s senior foreign policy adviser, Denis McDonough, stated that the president-elect “supports deploying a missile defense system when the technology is proved to be workable.”

* Four days later on November 12, 2008, the head of the U.S. missile defense agency, Lt. Gen. Trey Obering, stated that the U.S. missile defense system is “workable,” and, “Our testing has shown not only can we hit a bullet with a bullet, we can hit a spot on the bullet with a bullet.”

* On April 06, 2009 (two and half months after Obama took office), the Department of Defense announced that it was cutting the Missile Defense Agency program by $1.4 billion, cancelling the planned deployment of additional ground-based missile interceptors in Alaska, and halting two other missile defense efforts: the Airborne Laser Prototype Aircraft and the Multiple Kill Vehicle program.

* On April 8, 2010, Obama and Russian president Dmitry Medvedev signed the START II treaty, which states that there is an “interrelationship between strategic offensive arms and strategic defensive arms,” and “current strategic defensive arms do not undermine the viability and effectiveness” of the U.S. or Russia’s “strategic offensive arms.”

* On the day that Obama and Medvedev signed the START II treaty, the Russian government issued an official statement stressing that the treaty “can operate and be viable only if the United States of America refrains from developing its missile defense capabilities quantitatively or qualitatively.”

* On May 6, 2010, six U.S. Senators sent a letter to Obama requesting that he turn over the negotiating records for START II treaty. The Obama administration refused to turn over the records, despite the fact that the Nixon and Reagan administrations had turned over arms control treaty negotiating records when asked by Democratic Senators.

* On December 18, 2010,

• Obama sent a letter to the US Senate asserting, “The New START Treaty places no limitations on the development or deployment of our missile defense programs.”
• Senate Democrats defeated a Republican proposal to remove the language from the treaty that specifies an “interrelationship between strategic offensive arms and strategic defensive arms….”
• the U.S. Senate approved the START II treaty, with 100% of Democrats voting for it, and 67% of Republicans voting against it.

* In February 2011, Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Sergei Ryabkov stated, “If the U.S. increases the qualitative and quantitative potential of its missile defense, Russia may respond with “military-technical measures.”

* On May 18, 2011, Medvedev threatened to develop “our nuclear strike potential” if he cannot “work out a model for cooperation in anti-missile defense” with “my colleague and friend President Obama.”

* On March 26, 2012, shortly after Vladimir Putin was elected president of Russia under a cloud of electoral fraud, Obama had the following conversation with outgoing president Dmitry Medvedev while unaware that a microphone was recording them:

Obama: “On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this can be solved but it’s important for him [Putin] to give me space.”

Medvedev: “Yeah, I understand. I understand your message about space. Space for you.”

Obama: “This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility.”

Medvedev: “I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir.”