Franken-Lies-And-the-Lying-Liars-Who-Tell

"Wow! How do you know all this stuff?"
"Hey, I didn't get to be the head of the world's largest energy trading company just by
being a crook."
"So, wait. He's taking phony numbers, using them in a phony way, to make a phony
point?"
"Yeah. You got this guy's number? I got a little start-up company cooking here, and I
need a CFO who's willing to, you know, push the envelope."
"Gee, I don't have the number on me."
"Well, when you find it, give me a call on the Lear. Margie and I are flying to Aspen
for the week. Gotta go."
You know, Ken Lay might have taken a real beating in the press, but if you need
someone in a pinch to look at some shady number-crunching, he's a pal.
No sooner had I hung up with Ken, then I got a call from Thomas Mann at the Brookings
Institution which (as you may remember) bills itself as an "independent, nonpartisan organization."
Mann confirmed everything Lay had told me, but in a more boring, think tank-y
way. He explained that Kottman had compared apples to oranges, or more precisely, apple
lies to orange lies. An honest chart would compare Reagan's budget proposal to the budgets
Congress actually passed. The Hannity/Kottman chart, by contrast, compares Reagan's
budget to total spending. Here's the trouble: Once Congress passes a budget, what is actually
spent can vary depending on economic conditions, non-budgetary policy changes, and estimation
errors. This variance in spending cannot be entirely blamed on either Congress or the
White House.
Thanks for the fucking civics lesson, Tom.
Okay, let's rewind. Remember how Hannity described his table? He said it proved that
"had all of Reagan's budgets been adopted, federal spending would have been 25 percent less
on a cumulative basis." Even if we ignore all the table's faults, this is still a whopper.
If you accept the bizarro cumulative percent differences, you can argue that eight
years of Congressional budget increases would have yielded a 24.5 percent increase over the
last year of Reagan's budget (1989). But Hannity, lyingly, makes the claim that it would have
been 25 percent lower over the entire period. This is where Hannity left out one of Kottman's
numbers. On Kottman's original table, he included an "average cumulative percentage differ-