The Numbers Game

Chris Matthews, author of the Hard Ball, has a knack for getting his interviewees to make blunders.

At Tuesday's GOP debate between Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, Mr. Matthews threw such a question: "You've been having a tit for tat on tax cutting. What's the difference between the two of you?"

Here are the answers from the two presidential candidates:

Rudy Giuliani

"Under Governor Romney, spending went up in Massachusetts, per capita, by 8 percent. Under me [in New York] spending went down by 7 percent...I brought taxes down by 17 percent. Under him, taxes went up 11 percent per capita."

Mitt Romney

"It's baloney. Mayor, you've got to check your facts. No taxes -- I did not increase taxes in Massachusetts. I lowered taxes...My spending grew 2.2 percent a year. Yours grew 2.8 percent a year."

What appears here is that both presidential hopefuls were simply playing around with figures that made their statement statistically unfounded.

While Giuliani claimed spending in Massachusetts rose by "eight percent per capita,” he failed to clarify the time frame for comparison. Was it a year-on-year growth or a compounded raise over four years of his term? We don’t have to figure it out, as Michael Widmer, executive director of the non-partisan Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, has come up with an answer. According to Mr. Widmer, state budget for in Massachusetts grew a combined 27 per cent from 2003 to 2007, when Romney was in office. Adjusted for inflation, expenditures rose just over one percent a year.

Mr. Romney is no better. He said he hadn’t increased taxes in Massachusetts. But Mr. Widmer, of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation found, from public record, that the former governor did levy extra taxes on companies, raking in about $375 million a year. Considering the increase in various state fees and license payments, tax revenues grew a total of 32 percent in Massachusetts under Romney’s rein.

Too bad for the two candidates to assume that newspapers would be too busy to find out their selective use of numbers.