David Brooks Lies About Reagan and Reality

Last night on the Newshour with Jim Lehrer (emphasis added):

DAVID BROOKS: And — and I think partisanship — one of the things political science shows is that partisan shapes the reality you choose to see.

People choose the reality that — that flatters their partisanship. For example, in the Reagan years, unemployment went from 13 percent to 5 percent. If you asked Democrats, at the end of that, did unemployment go up or down under Reagan, 60 percent said it went up. Republicans said down.

You choose the reality you want to see.

Apparently so.

These unemployment figures are from the Census Bureau’s 1999 Statistical Abstract of the United States, Section 13, Figure 649, “Employment Status of the Civilian Population: 1950 to 1998”. According to the legend, they represent “annual averages of monthly figures.”

Year Unemployed
(percent of
labor force)
1980 7.1
1981 7.6
1982 9.7
1983 9.6
1984 7.5
1985 7.2
1986 7.0
1987 6.2
1988 5.5

First, note that none of the annual averages even approach “13 percent.” But more importantly unemployment in 1980 — the last year of Carter’s administration — was just over 7 percent, a figure that was below anything seen in the first five years of Reagan’s presidency. Even then, the numbers showing a downward trend were affected by changes in the methodology (Section 13, page 3):

Beginning in January 1985, and again in January 1986, the CPS estimation procedures were revised due to the implementation of a new sample design (for the 1985 revision) and to reflect an explicit estimate of the number of undocumented immigrants (for the 1986 revision).

First he claimed that under Reagan unemployment dropped 8 percentage points (13% to 5%) when by the government’s own figures it went down by 1.6 points from 1980 to 1988. He claimed that the unemployment rate had been 13% when the average annual rate was less than 10% at its highest. He implied that Reagan had reduced unemployment significantly when, in the first years of the Reagan administration, the unemployment rate actually increased, and it didn’t drop below the level of the last year of Carter’s final year until after Reagan’s re-election.

And that’s how partisanship shapes David Brooks’s reality.

You can retrieve monthly data for unemployment and many other statistics from the Bureau of Labor web site.

Crossposted to Daily Kos for comments.