the Republican War on Math: Tax Cuts and Austerity

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/11/the-next-chapters-in-the-republican-war-on-math-tax-cuts-and-austerity/265332/

The Next Chapters in the Republican War on Math: Tax Cuts and Austerity
By Heather Boushey

Nov 18 2012

On election night, Republican strategist and Fox News contributor Karl Rove was unwilling to believe that President Obama had won Ohio, arguing with anchor Megyn Kelly that Ohio was too close to call. Eventually, Kelly asked Rove if his calculations were "just math you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better or is this real?"

This televised moment on Election Day was one small victory for statistics. Another was that FiveThirtyEight blogger Nate Silver accurately predicted the election outcome, right down to the number of electoral votes, using a model that aggregates local and national polls.

These victories for math come on the heels of an election season where Mitt Romney repeatedly and willfully worked to convince the public that his tax plan would both deliver tax cuts and reduce the deficit, which was about as true as saying that two plus two equals five.

But the fact that Romney lost the election does not mean that the war on math is over. While election outcomes lay bare whose hopes got in the way of their math, on a host of other issues, understanding math-denial requires more digging.

There are two math fallacies affecting the current economic debate. First, Republicans continue to argue that tax cuts for the wealthy are key to growing the economy, despite solid evidence to the contrary. This argument is their primary objection to allowing President George W. Bush's tax cuts on the wealthy expire at the end of the year.

The facts fly in the face of their argument. We know what happened in the 2000s after the Bush tax cuts: Despite the supposedly job-creating tax breaks, our economy experienced its worst record for growth in investment, employment, and incomes in half a century, an outcome devastating to our middle class.

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A second example of math denialism is the notion that sharp cuts in spending to eliminate a budget deficit when an economy hasn't fully recovered from a deep recession will lead to robust economic growth and job creation. Both economic theory and recent experience in countries that have gone down the austerity path show that this perspective is willfully in denial of empirical reality. Countries that have been implementing austerity packages are now teetering toward, if not already in, recession.

The United Kingdom, for example, has pared back spending, but as it have done so, the rate of growth and job creation have both stalled. In fact, newly released forecasts from the International Monetary Fund show economic-growth prospects being revised down for Great Britain, as well as for most other European countries that have implemented aggressive austerity regimes, including Germany and France. According to the IMF's analysis, fiscal contraction now poses one of the top risks not just to the U.S. economy, but also to the overall world economic recovery.

Even as Republicans struggle with math in election forecasts or economic policy, they are also failing to grapple with science. GOP leaders also continue to argue that evidence of global warming is really a case of "manipulated data." But the empirical evidence is overwhelming that climate change is not only real, it is having serious economic and social impacts. The economic impacts are proving to be quite large: The cost of extreme weather events, which are becoming more common as the earth warms, is estimated to be $14.5 billion -- and that's before the cost of Hurricane Sandy.