I'm often in awe when confronted with the reality that certain types of people will seek out and defend their confirmation bias to the point of silliness. But there's a trend among supposedly educated, nominally intelligent individuals on the right that just boggles my mind.
In their quest to at last convince the majority of this nation who would suffer under their policy ideas, were they implemented, a certain sect of mathematicians has arisen among rightwing policy circles and given space in their most respected journals and think tanks. A brand of math that can't discern the difference between an average life span and life expectancy after retirement, but can write glowing reviews of Paul Ryan's plan to kill Medicare as though such knowledge of policy and consequence couldn't possibly matter when Very Serious People speak. I call this "wingnut math." a consequence of the wingnut logic anyone who's spent time on the Internet can recognize in less than one poorly punctuated paragraph.
In a post on his excellent blog, The Plum Line, Greg Sargent noted yet another instance of wingnut math rearing its head at that most excellent of intellectual fora, The Weekly Standard. Now, I know, I know, I'm navigating deep waters here, and the wonky, Byzantine analysis that we've all come to expect from Wingnuttistan's paper of record might elude a less well-trained individual, but I'm going to take a stab at a little metajournalism to see if I can make sense of the numbers.
It seems, according to former senior speechwriter for DHHS Secretary Mike Leavitt, Jeffrey H. Anderson, that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) created 2.4 million jobs at a cost of $278,000 apiece. Now, of course, these are really big numbers, and so the math can be tricky, but Anderson rolled up his sleeves, diagrammed the problem, applied a high-level theoretical model, then just gave up and divided the lowball Council of Economic Advisors estimate of jobs created by the ARRA by the total dollars spent. GENIUS! I mean, a lesser economist (and I'm assuming that all speechwriters are macroeconomic whiz-kids) would have accounted for, oh I don't know, maybe all the shit that got built like roads, clinics, factories, you know, stuff that costs money, in their analysis of ARRA. But not this self-effacing titan of teh stoopid. No, no, none of this counting up all the benefits of the stimulus and trying to figure out what worked and what didn't. Best to just bust out the old pen and paper, do a little 6th Grade level long division, and see what sticks. Obama failed!
This is wingnut math, and it absolutely saturates rightwing policy proposals. In fact, this parlor trick constitutes the fundamental psychotic break between the far right and the rest of the living world. For proof, check out these examples:
Exhibit A - A Cato Institute hatchet job, compares average Federal wages to average private sector wages and comes away saying that Federal employees make over 1.5 times what private sector do. Cato's methodology? Yeah, straight up compare average Federal salaries to average private sector salaries with no controls for education, job duties, or age. Because, in wingnut math, it's totally legitimate to compare a research scientist at the NIH with a PhD and 30 years of experience to a 16-year old McDonald's burger flipper. I mean, to the masters of the universe at Cato, wage slave = wage slave. Besides, who could tell us apart?
Exhibit B - "It’s fair that retirees’ benefits should begin at an older age," says the Heritage Foundation's David John. The basic premise of the article is that we're all living lots longer than anyone ever expected us to way back in 1935. Among some very silly red herrings about average age, which has nothing to do with life expectancy for Social Security annuitants, came a precious nail in the coffin for the reality-based community in the form of fully one half of a statistical analysis. "When the Social Security program was created in 1935, 65-year-old men could expect to spend about 13 years in retirement — 16 percent of their lifetime." Today, of course, we're living WAY longer than that, by like, centuries or something. Oh, what, you want actual numbers? Okay, let's see, according to the Social Security Administration, a man in the bottom 50th percentile for income (you know, the people who actually NEED their Social Security checks) who retired at age 65 in 2007 could expect to live another...16.1 years, or a whopping 3 years longer than his grandfather did. Wow, you're right, Dave. We ARE living longer! Jack that retirement age up to 90, and we'll save a bundle!
Exhibit C - For a few years now, just before tax time, a predictable outcry can be heard emanating from the luminaries of the rightwing media whose theme goes something like, "HALF OF ALL AMERICANS PAY NO TAXES!!!" Now, of course, we all know that the first axiom of wingnut math is to simplify or stupefy, so it seems Rush and Sean and Glenn and all the backup singers in the Hate-the-Poor choir might have missed a cintilla or two that various local, county, State, and yes, Federal government tax collectors managed to shake out of those notoriously greedy lower class felons-in-waiting. See, if Uncle Sam gives poor people a break on one of the many taxes they pay, then that of course means that they pay no taxes of any kind, and certainly aren't suffering like millionaire college dropout draft-dodgers like Rush Limbaugh. The fact that analysis of the bottom 50th percentile's total tax burden reveals that they pay a staggering 22.5 percent of their meager incomes to support the government compared to the top 400 richest Americans' 16.6 percent does not compute and must be tossed out of the equation.
Exhibit D - The Ryan Plan. In which lowering taxes on rich people somehow results in unprecedented growth and a balanced budget in the year 9999 AD. Or something.
These are only a few examples of wingnut math, and by no means even remotely comprehensive sample. Such a list would exhaust me to the point of suicide, and I'm almost positive I'd have a hard time explaining that to my boss. So I leave you with this challenge, take it up if it suits you, but pick any random policy proposal from the right wing, examine its claims, it conclusions, and if you dare, any supporting materials, and I'm willing to bet some Monopoly cash that you'll find, not even hidden from view or very difficult to suss out, a piece of wingnut math that you can call your own. Seriously, it's in everything they do. Get your kids to help. The younger the better. This is grade-school stuff we're talking about. I'm not kidding. 1 + 1 = SOCIALISM.