The LAT started something when it said in a December editorial that 60 million people in America survive on $7 a day. This was questioned in an earlier post here and the issue has now been taken up by others, especially Annie Jacobsen, in a post on Pajamasmedia. The source of the statistic has been identified by Jacobsen as David Cay Johnston, from a piece he wrote for the New York Times, published November 28, 2006.
Johnston responded to Jacobsen's post on the Pajamasmedia website, arguing that the figures he cited came directly from tables published by IRS, available on their website. He also cited tables prepared by Tax Foundation based on those IRS tables.
The trouble with Johnston's response is that the figures he cites in his response and in his 2006 NYT piece do not correspond to any figures appearing in the IRS or Tax Foundation tables. If he isn't merely blowing smoke, he should be able to specifically identify where in the tables his figures came from. Instead, he merely says we can look it up for ourselves. Well, this old fool has and the figures do not match. It's incumbent on Johnston, if he wants us to believe him, to specifically tell us how he got to his statistic.
Obviously, the NYT and the LAT should have insisted on that before they published the statistic.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Old Fool,
You wrote "The trouble with Johnston's response is that the figures he cites in his response and in his 2006 NYT piece do not correspond to any figures appearing in the IRS or Tax Foundation tables."
Wrong.
You can go to the IRS table for 2004 yourself and calculate the numbers for the bottom quintile and you will come up with the $7 per day figure.
I explained step-by-step how to do these calculations in a post at the blog where this was originally posted. A pen and paper are all you need.
Since I took my time to provide people who, evidently, do not even read the newspaper with the formula and the data source so they can check the math, how can you write something so utterly false?
Reporters take great care with facts. We are not perfect -- there is a reason the newspaper is called the first rough draft of history -- but we have a reverence for facts.
The Tax Foundation tables, for which I provided a link, are for the bottom half, not the bottom quintile. But you can calculate the average income of the bottom half from total AGI divided by number of taxpayers. The ceiling income for the bottom half is in the Tax Foundation tables. The figure will be about $15,000 per taxpayer for 2004, but go do the math yourself if you don't believe me.
Here, as with the original blog, I am amazed at the amount of energy expended on a single detail in the 15th paragraph of a story from, 14 months ago without a word about the big picture in my report.
Here is the top of my Nov. 28, 2006 article, the beginning being where the most significant findings go:
**********
Despite significant gains in 2004, the total income Americans reported to the tax collector that year, adjusted for inflation, was still below its peak in 2000, new government data shows.
Reported income totaled $7.044 trillion in 2004, the latest year for which data is available, down from more than $7.143 trillion in 2000, new Internal Revenue Service data shows.
Total reported income, in 2004 dollars, fell 1.4 percent, but because the population grew during that period average real incomes declined more than twice as much, falling $1,641, or 3 percent, to $53,974.
***********
Post a Comment