Reiland Gets It Wrong. Again.

I was too late to blog on this yesterday. As they say (and they DO say this, don't they?) no time like the present.

I've blogged on Ralph Reiland before and it's pretty safe to say he's in his element at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

He sets-up:

Here's the way Pulitzer winner Eugene Robinson, an associate editor and columnist for The Washington Post, recently described the tea party movement:

"The overhyped tea party phenomenon is more about symbolism and screaming than anything else. A 'movement' that encompasses gun nuts, tax protesters, devotees of the gold standard, Sarah Palin, insurance company lobbyists, 'constitutionalists' who have not read the Constitution, Medicare recipients who oppose government-run health care, crazy 'birthers' who claim President Obama was born in another country, a contingent of outright racists (come on, people, let's be real) and a bunch of fat-cat professional politicians pretending to be 'outsiders' is not a coherent intellectual or political force."

Then he goes about to debunk (or so he thinks) Robinson's generalization.

First by saying that he was at a local tea-party rally and it didn't resemble at all what Robinson wrote. Hmm - do you see the logic error there? It's pretty obvious, as he's comparing a specific event to a generalization about a great deal of events. Now if Robinson was talking about the specific rally Reiland attended, Reiland might be onto something. But as it is, this is completely beside the point.

Then Reiland pulls out a old chestnut of a wingnut argument:

Second, one could hardly say that the "tea party phenomenon" has been "overhyped," except in a negative way by the mainstream media and by establishment politicians. Right from the start, Nancy Pelosi warned that tea partyers were Nazis because she saw a picture of a swastika at an event.

Except that she didn't refer to "tea partyers as Nazis" did she? Here's what Newsmax.com (hardly a liberal voice) said in August.

To a question about the legitimacy of the opposition to health care reform:

“I think they are Astroturf . . . you be the judge,” Pelosi answered. “They’re carrying swastikas and symbols like that to a town meeting on healthcare.”

That's it.

As we pointed out last August when we discussed this image from one of last summer's health care protests:

We wrote:

By crossing out the swastika, what do you think the protester was saying? She was protesting against what she saw as Nazism - in the health care plan. She was calling the plan Nazism.

And yet it's charged that Pelosi is calling the protesters Nazis, when in fact...it's the protesters who are calling the health care plan Nazism.[emphasis added]

And what do you think Reiland does? He does the same thing:

There were a few swastikas and Hitler pictures (plus some occasional pictures of hammers and sickles and Lenin and Che), but those were anti-Nazi, anti-totalitarian and anti-communist expressions -- examples of the threat to individual liberty from overblown government and overreaching politicians.

Take a close look. He's saying the protests were warning of some coming Nazi threat. It's the overblown government and overreaching politicians who are acting like Nazis. People like Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama. But in wingnut world that means that Pelosi was calling protestors Nazis.

But Reiland really blows his wad on this:

On the "birther" part, that's not my issue. But if it was me and millions of people thought I was a foreign interloper, a pinko from Kenya, I'd just produce the original birth certificate.

Sorry Ralph. But that makes you a birther.

In the end Ralph Reiland projects his own logical inadequacies onto Eugene Robinson:

Robinson concludes by saying that "American public opinion seems to have become an unguided Weapon of Mass Suspicion." In fact, that's exactly what Robinson has done in his ridiculing of the tea party movement. He's allowed his suspicions to distort his objectivity and destroy his credibility.

Given everything above, whose objectivity is distorted and whose credibility has been destroyed?

I'd say the birther who can't understand the difference between a generalization and a specific event.

More Sloppy Work At The Trib

This time from someone who (as he is an academic) should know better.

Oh, and there's a little tribbing going on as well - but more on that in a minute.

Ralph Reiland, associate professor of economics at Robert Morris University, writes this in today's Pittsburgh Tribune Review:

Here's the news from The New York Times last Wednesday, the day before Tax Day: "Forty-seven percent. That's the portion of American households that owe no (federal) income tax for 2009. The number is up from 38 percent in 2007."

Given that jump among no-pays in just two years, it won't be many days before the majority of American households are taking out more than they're putting in when it comes to income tax monies.

And by paying zero, what's their incentive to keep from pushing for more spending on every federal boondoggle that's funded by the income tax, no matter how wasteful or crooked the project? To better feather their own nests, why shouldn't they all be riding around with "Raise the Income Tax" bumper stickers on their cars?

But when we go to the Times we find that Reiland's quoting a column and not the news. Professor, if you're going to quote something, you have to give it it's proper attribution. In this case it's a column by David Leonhardt, economics columnist at the NYTimes. But that's the small point as we should expect the facts in a column to be factual (not always the case at The Trib, but you know what I mean).

The larger point is that while Reiland's improperly quoting the column, he's also misquoting it. Take a look at the sentences that directly follow what Reiland called "the news":

That’s the portion of American households that owe no income tax for 2009. The number is up from 38 percent in 2007, and it has become a popular talking point on cable television and talk radio. With Tax Day coming on Thursday, 47 percent has become shorthand for the notion that the wealthy face a much higher tax burden than they once did while growing numbers of Americans are effectively on the dole.

Neither one of those ideas is true. They rely on a cleverly selective reading of the facts. So does the 47 percent number. [emphasis added]

Professor, if you are going to quote something, you have to make sure that it says what you say it says or you have to explain why it doesn't.

Here's more from the NYTimes column - stuff Reiland dutifully omitted:

The 47 percent number is not wrong. The stimulus programs of the last two years — the first one signed by President George W. Bush, the second and larger one by President Obama — have increased the number of households that receive enough of a tax credit to wipe out their federal income tax liability.

But the modifiers here — federal and income — are important. Income taxes aren’t the only kind of federal taxes that people pay. There are also payroll taxes and investment taxes, among others. And, of course, people pay state and local taxes, too.

Even if the discussion is restricted to federal taxes (for which the statistics are better), a vast majority of households end up paying federal taxes. Congressional Budget Office data suggests that, at most, about 10 percent of all households pay no net federal taxes. The number 10 is obviously a lot smaller than 47.

And the tribbing? Reiland quotes the Tax Foundation - another Scaife funded thinktank.

• $100,000 in 2008
• $100,000 in 2007
• $100,000 in 2006

Given that Reiland works for Richard Mellon Scaife and his boss has sent at least a quarter of a million dollars in the last three years to a think tank he cites in his column, doncha think Reiland should have mentioned that?

Transparency and all...