Free unSpun by Brooks Jackson Page A

times as large as the typical tax cut. Bush’s “average” figure was like that. Big reductions for a relative few at the top of the income scale pulled up the average to a figure higher than was typical for most working Americans.
    Bush also likes to point to increases in “average” income since he took office, as though everybody were enjoying improved financial well-being. For example, his White House staff issued a “fact sheet” in February 2006 that crowed, “Real after-tax income per person has risen 7.9 percent” since the president took office five years earlier. That figure accurately cites the latest quarterly statistics from the Department of Commerce, and it’s true that many Americans did very well financially during Bush’s first five years. But the average is misleading. Most of the gains were at the top, and many if not most Americans lost ground.
    We know that was true for Bush’s first four years, because for that period we have a better measure: a median figure, not an average. The median is the midpoint: half do better, half do worse. In 2005, according to a massive annual survey conducted by the Census Bureau, the median inflation-adjusted income per household since Bush took office had
fallen
by 2.7 percent, to $46,326. That’s a before-tax figure, not strictly comparable to the after-tax figure the president prefers, but the $470 tax cut we mentioned earlier (also a median figure) wouldn’t make up for the $1,273 decline in median before-tax income.
    Other statistics fill in a picture of upper-income Americans gaining while lower-income Americans slipped back during this time. The strongest of these is the poverty rate, which went up under Bush, from 11.3 percent in Bill Clinton’s final year to 12.6 percent in 2005. An estimated 5.4 million Americans fell into poverty, more people than live within the city limits of Chicago and Houston combined. This is a good example of why we say that the “average” bears watching.
    When you hear “average,” always ask, “Does that really mean ‘typical’?” A single number seldom tells the whole story, especially with something as big and complicated as the U.S. economy or the federal tax system.
    TRICK #6:
The Baseline Bluff
    T HIS ONE IS A FAVORITE OF D EMOCRATS IN THE U NITED S TATES , but it works in other countries as well. In Britain’s 2005 elections, the Labour party plastered yellow “Warning” posters all over Britain claiming “The Tories will cut £35bn from public services.” Actually, the Tories planned to
increase
spending, by £181 billion. But that increase was £35 billion smaller than the one Labour planned, so Labour called it a cut. As the British television network Channel 4 put it on their own “FactCheck” website: “In nominal terms, therefore, the £35bn is just a smaller increase, rather than a cut.”
    The same trick is used over and over in U.S. elections. In 1996, Bill Clinton accused his opponent, Bob Dole, of trying to “cut” Medicare by $270 billion. Actually, Dole and Republicans in Congress had never proposed to reduce the amount of money spent on Medicare, merely to hold down the rate of increase. Their plan could only be called a “cut” in relation to projected future spending, what budget experts like to call the “baseline.” Clinton himself had proposed a “cut” of $124 billion in projected Medicare spending, without calling it that.
    John Kerry used the same tactic late in his 2004 campaign, running an ad saying “Bush has a plan to cut Social Security benefits by 30 to 45 percent.” That was simply false. Bush had stated repeatedly there would be no changes in benefits for anyone already getting them. What Kerry was referring to was a proposal, which Bush eventually embraced, to hold future benefit levels even with the rate of inflation, rather