I posted a quick blurb yesterday about Fiorina lying about Obama’s tax policy. Carly Fiorina is an advisor to John McCain, so it’s not a surprise that she’s out there just making stuff up about Obama’s tax policy. After all, the McCain campaign is just making stuff up in general right now, so why should his advisors do anything different?

Hilzoy, who does the best job in the blogs of really breaking down policy proposals for the rest of us, has taken a closer look at the claims being made by various McCain advisors. What makes her so good is that she recognizes that most often, campaigns don’t lie but instead heavily spin individual data points. So, she tracks down the original sources for those data points and then sees if the candidate has a leg to stand on.

Her conclusion, after looking at several of these claims (by McCain himself, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, his economic advisor, Carly Fiorina, and Steve Forbes), is that these people are lying. This isn’t a word that she uses lightly, so this isn’t just partisan name calling. These folks are being dishonest. As Jay Newton-Small, of Time Magazine, said when fact-checking Fiorina’s claims:

So, when running HP did 23 million = a few hundred thousand? No wonder she got fired.

That’s the type of basic factual dishonesty going on in their explanations (the quote will make more sense if you go read the piece).

The problem right now is that the only press really covering the data here are all blogs. I’ve yet to see a piece like Jay Newton-Small’s in the print edition of Time or on the main web sites of CNN, etc. So, this means that a lot of this is about everyone being diligent about detecting this sort of dishonesty.

The trick is pretty simple: Whenever a candidate gives you a statistic or makes an assertion without explanation, be skeptical. Very skeptical. This goes for both candidates, though McCain’s camp bears extra scrutiny.

In particular, a basic familiarity with the basic demographics of the U.S. will help raise the most common red flags. Here are the key data points:

• Population: 300 million
• Approx. 135 million income tax returns filed (Single/Married/Joint/etc)
• 9 million Partnership, S or C Corp returns filed
• Median (NOT average) Household income in the United States: $44,389
• Percentage of households making more than $250,000: 1.5% (same Wikipedia link as median income)

The income tax returns data above is from the IRS Data Book for 2007, specifically Table 2 (Excel Spreadsheet).

(random aside: There’s a tendency, especially for people in the $70K-200K income range, to think that most people are like them. Most people are not. Most people make less. Think about that household income number. Half of the country makes less than $44K per year per household. If your household makes more than around $90K, you’re in the top fifth of households in the U.S. If your household makes more than $159K or so, you’re in the top 5% of households in the U.S.)

Those data points above should be memorized by everyone, in my opinion. They form the foundational statistics of understanding policy in the U.S. Want to ballpark how much a $600 check to every taxpayer costs, just multiply by 135 million. Want to estimate whether Obama’s tax plan targeting incomes over $250,000 really affects 23 million small businesses, as McCain claims? See if there are even 23 million possible businesses in that range ((135 million + 9 million) times 1.5% = 2.16 million == no).

Granted, they won’t be hundred percent accurate. That last calculation, for example, uses the 1.5% number for household income distribution but adds in corporate returns. The more accurate numbers look even worse, actually. Read Hilzoy or Jay Newton-Small above for the nitty gritty. These numbers do work for quick back of the envelope estimation, though, and give you good starting points for further investigation. For example, what is a “small business” to the McCain people (remembering that in 2004, the definition included George W. Bush himself)?

Definitions matter, and this is one area where the blogs excel. You could do much worse than reading Obsidian Wings, quite frankly. If you added one blog to your daily reads, that should be it.

And, since I link to just about everything they write (it’s a group blog like FatMixx), here’s a look at the two candidates on Social Security. Like I said, she’s better at giving the benefit of the doubt to candidates that are ideologically opposite her, but her frustration is clear:

I would be more than happy to concede that I am wrong: that McCain has plans for raising revenues or cutting spending that I haven’t taken into account. But in order to do that, I’d have to see some concrete proposals from him. And the truth is: there aren’t any.

This is what I mean by lying. Glenn Greenwald had a great quote from Abraham Lincoln yesterday that sums “lying” up well:

I believe it is an established maxim in morals that he who makes an assertion without knowing whether it is true or false, is guilty of falsehood…

There is no way they can justify most of the claims they’re making (balancing the budget by 2013, tax policy, etc) because they haven’t done the work to outline how they will get there. It’s all assertion after assertion without any acknowledgment of fact.

Contrast this with the Obama campaign, which has detailed policy proposals on their web site and you can see why I’m voting for Obama this fall.