Politics, Numbers, and Government

I have two British friends who dwell on the conservative side of the political spectrum. One of them lives here in the States and the other over in the UK. Less than two years ago  my US Brit friend ran for local office as a Republican. Since then, he’s become increasingly horrified with his party and has started looking into independent conservative parties.

My UK friend, though, living at a greater distance, still seems (to me) to think it’s business as usual in US conservative politics. I tried to disabuse him of that idea — that today’s GOP is nothing like the GOP of the 90s. Or, rather, it’s only like the fringe elements of the 90s’ GOP that were mainly useful for hating the Clintons within boundaries but were otherwise kept on a leash, the ones who tried to put on a good show at Bill Clinton’s impeachment hearings. I tried to explain to him that the things these members of the GOP are saying are completely falsified by all available numbers.

And in our little email exchange he blithely dismissed the numbers: “Don’t trust them.” Our conversation ended shortly after that, but it stuck with me because I think it demonstrates widespread conservative misunderstanding about the US government. For one thing, he seems to think that the Federal government is a single entity. But we need to comprehend scale here. The Federal government employed about 2.7 million civilians and about 4.4 million people overall, if we include the military, as of just a couple of years ago.  As of the beginning of June 2017, Trump had appointed maybe a handful of people to posts: certainly less than 100. The US federal government is a vast complex of different departments largely staffed by people who stay in these positions for years, regardless of who holds the Office of the President or who is in Congress.

That is also true of the entities that gather our data, like the Congressional Budget Office or the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This independence has been painfully illustrated by the recent numbers coming out of the Congressional Budget Office about the GOP’s latest iteration of their attempts at health care reform. According to the CBO’s latest numbers, the current GOP plan would cause 32 million people to lose health insurance over the next ten years.

Now keep in mind that the GOP currently controls all three branches of government. It can’t grease its wheels much more than that. And this control extends to Congress, which oversees the office producing these numbers.

If government numbers weren’t to be trusted, the CBO would be working for the party in charge right now by spitting out falsified numbers that make the GOP healthcare plan look good. But, it’s not.

The fact is, for the most part the federal government, as an entity, carries out business as usual regardless of who is in power. If it didn’t, this country would be in a much bigger mess than it is. The entities that gather our data attempt to do so to the best of their ability, and being who they are, remain the best source of information about the US economy, jobs, education, and a host of other segments of our society. This general distrust of “government numbers” can only proceed from an inattention to the facts or, in other words, ignorance.

Pay attention to the numbers. They mean something.