What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: Political Half-Truths
It’s an election year, so naturally there are virtual fire hoses of misinformation aimed at potential voters. While there are encouraging signs that people are becoming better at noticing misinformation, there is a kind of “fake news” that seems particularly pernicious on both sides of the political aisle: conclusions based on omitted information or missing context. It’s a favorite tactic of politicians that explodes during election years, so let’s dive into a couple of common examples—one on the right and one on the left.
The picture above, taken by Snopes , who took it from my aunt’s Facebook page, is not photoshopped or a lie. The national average price for a gallon of gasoline actually dropped to $1.77 in April 2020. But the meme’s text suggests it was somehow related to decisions Donald Trump made while in office.
The answer is always supply and demand.
People like to debate the reasons why gas prices fluctuate, probably because we experience it every time we go to the gas station, but whether you blame high gas prices on corporate greed or attribute low gas prices to the amazing Donald Trump , you are equally wrong. The main driver of gas prices is supply and demand. The real reason gas was so cheap in 2021 was because of the global drop in oil demand caused by economic activity due to the Covid-19 lockdown. It wouldn’t matter who the president was; There is no lever in the Oval Office that sets commodity prices.
This does not mean that government policies do not influence prices. The surge in inflation in 2022 was caused in part by the $2 trillion American Rescue Plan signed into law in 2021. A recession causes inflation, but it also forces the economy to grow and avoid recession (a much worse outcome than higher inflation). Again, it’s supply and demand.
Politicians on both sides lie
However, it is not only people on the right who fall victim to the temptation to jump to conclusions. Look at this chart tweeted by Kamala Harris:
Like the right-wing meme, this chart isn’t inaccurate or photoshopped, but it leaves out the same thing that’s missing from the gas price photo: COVID. Most of the jobs “created” under the Biden administration were the result of people returning to work after layoffs during the pandemic. Adjusted for COVID, net job gains from the first day of the Biden administration through February 2024 were 5.5 million jobs. Nice job, but looks much less sexy in the graphics.
During his State of the Union address, Biden said, “The only president other than Donald Trump who lost jobs during his administration was Herbert Hoover,” which is half true (maybe), but only if you ignore the economic devastation that Covid is and is ignoring the fact that we don’t actually know the number of jobs lost during the Hoover administration—the Bureau of Labor Statistics did not exist until after Hoover left office.
How the same numbers tell a different story
While Biden was overly positive about his own performance and exaggerated Trump’s numbers, looking at the same basic information could lead to the opposite conclusion. In his speech on August 5, Donald Trump said: ” In Biden’s first 30 months in office, only 2.1 million new jobs were created, but in contrast, in my first 30 months in office, we created 4.9 million new jobs.” “
When Trump took office, the U.S. had 145.6 million nonfarm jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Thirty months later there were 150.8 million (for one thing, Trump gave himself a little less credit than he deserved during that speech). . When Biden took office, there were 143 million nonfarm payroll jobs. By his 30th month in office, nonfarm payrolls had grown to 156.2 million.
Trump isn’t completely lying (this time) – he’s trying to have his cake and have it too. He doesn’t give Biden credit for the jobs that have returned from the coronavirus pandemic or blame himself for the jobs lost due to COVID, limiting his assessment to the 30 months of the Trump administration before COVID rocked the economy. As Dean Baker, co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, told Politifact, Trump says “everything that was bad was Biden’s fault, while everything that was good would have happened anyway.”
Spinning numbers to make yourself look better is nothing new, but what if you really want to know the truth? You probably can’t.
Which administration has a stronger economy?
Even though polls show Trump leading Biden by 11 to 20 points on the question of which candidate would handle the economy better, the economy under Trump has done well, excluding Covid-19 shocks, and the economy under Biden things are going well if you don’t blame Biden for the COVID shock. (It also depends on what you mean by “the economy is doing well.”)
Even if you wanted to base your vote solely on which administration would be “best for the economy” (instead of, say, which candidate is on trial for nearly 100 felonies), that’s probably not possible, even though We have recent data on how each dealt with it. The impact of government policy on the economy is such a complex topic, and there are so many people pushing so many agendas—weirdos sharing gas price memes on Facebook, vice presidents sharing slanted job graphs on Twitter—that it is probably impossible to understand this is using any degree of confidence. Even if you devote your life to studying macroeconomics, the views of other economists will be diametrically opposed to yours.
This leaves us with tribalism and sentiment, two factors that have arguably always determined US elections. If you’re thinking, “That’s true for most politicians, but not for my favorite one ! They are straightforward!” the fur pulled over your eyes. A political candidate who was truly honest, who refused to engage in deception and self-righteousness, would be dead in the water in any election larger than the local school board. Imagine a presidential candidate running on a platform of “I can’t do much about the economy; it’s supply and demand.”