I’ve never been of the mind that statistics can be made to say ANYTHING, but two misleading tricks are common. The first is to muddle the difference between average values and median values. Why for instance, does the White House insist on referring to AVERAGE family income when talking about tax cuts (from its website: “Under the President’s proposal to speed up tax relief, 92 million taxpayers would receive, on average, a tax cut of $1,083 in 2003.”) versus MEDIAN family income when arguing that government spending has been skyrocketing (See this chart)?
The second trick is selecting data ranges to produce the desired result. The 5-year range of the OMB’s chart seems like a nice round number, but is it any coincidence that 1998 coincides with the real start of the stock market bubble and also of capital gains tax windfall?
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