“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics,” goes the saying popularized by Mark Twain.
And often, government statistics can make damn lies look downright agreeable. Take, for example, the new numbers out on the cost of Referendum C.
Endlessly, we were told the measure would only cost an “estimated” 3.7 billion dollars – about $70 per person.
An “estimate” is an approximate judgment or calculation. What we have in this case is what you, in the real world, might be inclined to call a “guesstimation” or a perhaps, a politically motivated “crock.”
How do I know? Well, recently, the nonpartisan Legislative Council revised its estimate of Referendum C’s cost from $3.7 billion to $4.7 billion. Just this fiscal year, the state collected around $300 million more than expected.
Remember, it’s a year since the vote.
I realize a billion dollars doesn’t go as far as it used to, and what’s a few hundred million between friends? But even supporters of C would have to concede that a billion dollars might have changed some votes. At the very least, the truth about these rickety “estimates” would have left them suspicious.
“Forecasters are routinely wrong,” explains John Williams, a staff economist at the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan tax research group based in Washington, D.C. “A lot of these revenue forecasters have a thankless job. Most often they do the best they can do. You can’t really model human behavior. We see this on the federal government all the time.”
So who knows what the price tag of Referendum C will be when it’s all said and done? Apparently no one.
Mike Mauer, the Legislative Council’s chief economist, has the thankless job of coming up with numbers for the “blue book.” He tells me, in essence, that the economy is fickle and, well, they do their best.
But Mauer never campaigned for Referendum C. That can’t be said of Gov. Bill Owens’ budget director, Henry Sobanet, who, miraculously, always seems to brandish numbers that bolster whatever position the governor happens to be taking at the time.
For instance, despite the council’s current cost estimate of $4.7 billion, Sobanet now “estimates” that the cost to taxpayers will only be $3.9 billion because – get this – he knows that there will be a recession by 2010.
Williams, of the Tax Foundation, though he hasn’t seen Sobanet’s model, says that it’s unorthodox to include a recession in such a projection. No one he knows sees a major recession coming.
One wonders, with his gift of clairvoyance, why Sobanet isn’t chairman of the Federal Reserve – or, at the very least, running one of those psychic storefronts on Federal Boulevard.
When I ask him about the near-billion- dollar discrepancy, Sobanet explains that small numbers can compound into large differences in projections. He goes on to say that “we’ll just have to see” which projection is right.
What is this? Las Vegas?
In any event, the news of hundreds of millions of extra dollars flowing their way has some, like Democratic Speaker of the House Andrew Romanoff, clicking their heels. Colorado is back, he says.
No. Colorado never went anywhere. Citizens don’t measure success by the amount of their money government can spend for them, but rather by the amount of money they’re spending on their own family.
So will Romanoff, or anyone else, answer for the distortions of the Referendum C campaign? Of course not.
In fact, Owens – whose rating in Cato Institute’s Fiscal Policy Report Card on America’s Governors went from an A to a D this year because of his stand on C – is now featured in a Maine commercial touting the benefits of a Taxpayer Bill of Rights.
Maine residents would be prudent to pass their own version of TABOR, but why they would listen to Owens on this issue is a complete mystery.
Sort of like some of the statistics that come out of his office.
David Harsanyi’s column appears Monday and Thursday. He can be reached at 303-954-1255 or dharsanyi@denverpost.com.
