Return of the "Biggest Deficit" Meme
Unlike animals, bad arguments don't generally become extinct. They do tend to become a bit rarer as they lose credibility, though, leaving pundits (and the pundit-ish, of course) to make a game of spotting them. Call it Intellectual Ornothology.
My latest sighting comes courtesy of the webmaster of Electoral-Vote.com (emphasis added):
"The Votemaster" - October 10th, 2006 My conclusion from this is that the Democrats should simply forget about these voters. It is a lost cause and catering to them just alienates other voters. Instead, they should forget family values and attempt to peel off libertarians from the Republican party. These people are hopping mad at the Republicans for abandoning their long-standing commitment to balanced budgets and for Bush's turning the Clinton surplus he inherited into the biggest budget deficit in history.
Ah, the deficit. The Dodo of bad argument birdwatching. Upon reading the above, I contacted "The Votemaster" via electronic mail to inform him of his rampant mistakenness, helpfully pointing out that the "biggest budget deficit in history" was really no such thing. The number this cheeky fellow is surely referring to is the $411 billion deficit the U.S. ran in 2004.
There are two problems with this claim, each of which is, by itself, reason enough to dismiss it, and which together form the argumentative equivalent of some kind of seismic event.
The first is that calling it the "biggest budget deficit in history" does not take inflation into account. Without this adjustment, you might as well claim that things were better during the Garfield administration because taffy only cost a nickel a pound (as an aside, I do differ vehemently with the Bush administration on the issue of taffy tarrifs).
So, how large is the deficit when inflation is taken into account? Well, the wonderful thing about the Internet is that no matter what subject you're interested in, someone's probably already made a chart on it. And in this instance, that someone is the collective entity known as FactCheck.org, which shows that the deficit, while bigger than anyone should be comfortable with, is not only not the largest ever, but not even the largest in the last 20 years.
The second problem with the claim is that the significance of a country's deficit is entirely dependent on the size of its economy. This is patently obvious to anyone with any sort of budget; if you make more money, you can spend more. The best way to determine how large the deficit really is, then, is to measure it as a percentage of GDP. And by this measure, it's not only not a record, but it's not even especially large. The 2004 deficit was the highest of Bush's tenure thus far, and was still only 2.7% of GDP. A quick, completely un-thorough perusal shows that more than 20 of the last 64 years have seen larger deficits by this measure.
All this is ignoring the most recent deficit numbers, which show a staggering two-year drop of almost 40%, to $247.7 billion (which is just 1.9% of GDP).
Ignore inflation and the size of the economy, and you can claim that just about any economic statistic today constitues a "record," with the notable exception of Pet Rock sales, which are stagnant under any measure.
» October 19th, 2006
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