Brian Beutler in TPMDC, mocking Sen. John Thune for illiteracy:
Sen. John Thune (R-SD) — the fifth highest ranking Republican in the Senate — has a new plan for lowering deficits, and as you might expect from GOP leadership, it involves zero tax hikes. It does however, involve math and, if his appearance on Fox News last night is any indication, Thune finds math rather difficult. There’s really no other way to explain his utter failure to remember the law of diminishing returns when he talked about the benefits of his deficit reduction plan.
Appearing on Fox News, Thune and host Greta Van Susteren discussed the bill’s call for the creation of a Joint Committee on Deficit Reduction, tasked with reducing the deficit 10 percent year over year.
“It would be required to find 10% in savings — 10% of the deficit in savings every budget cycle,” Thune said.
“So in 10 years we wouldn’t have a deficit?” van Sustern asked.
“Theoretically, yes,” Thune replied. “10% Is a floor. Obviously — you can go beyond that.”
This is what’s known in think tank (and Twitter) circles as a #mathfail.
That was posted at 3:15 p.m. EDT. Beutler has not yet realized he has much egg to wipe off his snarky face. Here’s Wikipedia:
The law of diminishing returns has been described as one of the most famous laws in all of economics.[1] In fact, the law is central to production theory, one of the two major divisions of neoclassical microeconomic theory. The law states “that we will get less and less extra output when we add additional doses of an input while holding other inputs fixed. In other words, the marginal product of each unit of input will decline as the amount of that input increases holding all other inputs constant.”
The law of diminishing returns indeed! Talk of glass houses and throwing stones.
*** Update, 1:55 p.m. ***
It gets worse. Appalling ignorance of the meaning of the phrase he chose to use was followed by an exhibition that Beutler, to use his own words, finds math rather difficult:
According to Thune’s plan, “the new Joint Committee must introduce legislation that eliminates or reduces spending on wasteful government programs and achieves a savings of at least 10 percent of the previous year’s budget deficit.” Because the deficit would decrease over time, the actual returns on 10 percent annual savings would diminish over time, such that it would take over 20 years to reduce the deficit to a penny.
Anyone with the slightest understanding of math would see at once that if you start with $1.4 trillion (to use a nice plump round number), and keep shaving it by 10% each year, it takes a hell of a lot more than 20 years to reduce the initial amount to a penny.
After 50 years, it’s still $7.2 billion. After 100 years, $37 million. It reaches one penny after 306 years. Which, last I checked, isn’t approximately equal to 20.
As the title of his post reads: Math is Hard!
*** Update 2, 2:02 p.m. ***
As I was typing up the first update, Beutler revised his title from “Math Is Hard: John Thune’s Plan To Eliminate Deficits In 10 20 Years” to “Math Is Hard: John Thune’s Plan To Eliminate Deficits In 10 Many Years“.
He revised the text from: “it would take over 20 years to reduce the deficit to a penny” to “it would take decades to reduce the deficit to a penny”.
Which is still way off the mark, of course, but maybe he’s still grinding his way through the math.
There is no acknowledgment that the post was revised, which is not exactly as per the Best Practices Handbook.
The sentence about the law of diminishing returns is still shining in its full glory.
*** Update 3, 2:05 p.m. ***
Super-brilliant! Beutler is making a complete fool of himself in real time. He was actually grinding his way through the math! The title now reads “Math Is Hard: John Thune’s Plan To Eliminate Deficits In 10 43 Years“.
*** Update 4, 2:15 p.m. ***
I missed exactly when this change was made, but the text now reads: “it would take decades to reduce the deficit to a percent of its current level.”
The title remains “Math Is Hard: John Thune’s Plan To Eliminate Deficits In 10 43 Years“.
The two statements are, of course, mutually inconsistent. If it takes decades to reduce the deficit to 1% of its current level, it won’t be close to being eliminated in 43 years.
In fact, in 43 years a deficit of $1.4 trillion dollars would drop to $15 billion, which means it would still be a little more than 1%.
*** Update 5, 2:19 p.m. ***
Emendments continue apace. The text now reads:
Because the deficit would decrease over time, the actual returns on 10 percent annual savings would diminish over time, such that it would take decades to reduce the deficit to one percent of its current level. Forty-three years to be exact.
The title still reads: “Math Is Hard: John Thune’s Plan To Eliminate Deficits In 10 43 Years“.
This is as ugly and disturbing a display of sheer blogger-stupidity and dishonesty (by which I mean the complete failure to acknowledge the whole series of material revisions) as I can remember seeing in a left-wing blog.
*** Update 6, 2:24 p.m. ***
I guess I’m now live-blogging Beutler’s slowly awakening mathematical and economic consciousness. With any luck, we’ll be able to keep this going all night.
The text still reads:
Because the deficit would decrease over time, the actual returns on 10 percent annual savings would diminish over time, such that it would take decades to reduce the deficit to one percent of its current level. Forty-three years to be exact.
The title now reads: “Math Is Hard: John Thune’s Plan To Eliminate Deficits In 10 Many, Many Years“.
Beutler continues to exhibit utter failure to remember the meaning of “the law of diminishing returns”.
*** Update 7, 2:37 p.m. ***
Beutler has added the following:
Late update: A reader emails with specifics: “It’d actually take 100 years to reduce the deficit to $26 million — stipulating a $1 trillion deficit as the baseline.”
No time-stamp (see Best Practices Handbook).
Still no acknowledgment anywhere of wholesale corrections to embarrassing math errors in a post the central point of which is to make fun of a Republican Senator for a very similar math error.
*** Update 8, 2:40 p.m. ***
In 100 years, by any normal laws of rounding, $1 trillion would actually drop to $27 million but, hey, why sweat the math?
*** Update 9, 2:46 p.m. ***
I just looked over at the right column content in Beutler’s post, and noticed that his story is billed as the top story under TPM Top News, with the teaser:
Thune’s Tragic #mathfail
Forgets To Check Math Before
He Pitches Deficit Plan On TV
Truly hilarious! They should at least change that to “John and Brian’s Tragic #mathfail”.
*** Update 10, 6:04 p.m. ***
Brian Beutler seems to be determined to prove, as comprehensively as it is possible to do so in one post, that a little learning is indeed a dangerous thing. Or, at least, deeply embarrassing.
He’s added another little something to his post:
Because the deficit would decrease yearly, the actual returns on 10 percent annual savings would diminish over time, such that it would take decades to reduce the deficit to one percent of its current level. Forty-three years to be exact. For those who remember Zeno’s paradox, it would actually be impossible to ever completely eliminate the deficit under the Thune plan.
It’s not enough to remember Zeno’s paradox, dude. You have to understand the damn thing too. Because the simple fact of the matter is that Zeno’s paradox is actually false. (Oh, and Zeno’s paradox also has nothing at all to do with the problem at hand.)
Given the intelligence, and grasp of the subject, that Beutler has demonstrated so far, and that late update, it’s pretty obvious that someone emailed Beutler about Zeno’s paradox.
So either Beutler didn’t even bother to look it up, and just added that sentence to the post. I hate to keep invoking the Best Practices Handbook, but I’m sure that even TPM interns understand that that’s a big no-no.
Or Beutler looked it up and wasn’t able to understand that a) it is false, and b) it doesn’t actually apply to this problem.
Either way, Beutler has stuff on his face. And I don’t think it’s egg this time.
(I have never before written a post with 10 updates. But then, I have never ever encountered something like Beutler’s constantly evolving, continuously self-embarrassing post. What I’m very impressed by is how well the title of my post has stood up, as the post evolved into something so very different from what it started out as.)
*** Last and Final Update (1 hope!), Thursday, 10:58 a.m. ***
This morning, at 7:05 EDT, I sent the following email to David Kurtz, Managing Editor of TPM:
Are you aware that:
1) in his John Thune #mathfail post yesterday, Brian Beutler originally had an epic #mathfail of his own
2) He made a whole slew of corrections to his post (eventually getting the math right, after many iterations) without one single acknowledgment anywhere in the post that it was revised
3) Since we are talking about wholesale corrections to embarrassing math errors in a post the central point of which is to make fun of a Republican Senator for a very similar embarrassing math error, this can’t be considered as the correction of typos; they were very material errors.I’m writing in the hope that TPM has some kind of policy requiring material changes to posts to be acknowledged. I can furnish more details if you have any interest in pursuing this.
Sincerely,
Sarabeth
This may not have had anything to do with it — especially since my email was addressed to their “Comments and News Tips” mailbox, talk@talkingpointsmemo.com; the best I could do was put “email for David Kurtz” in the subject line — but I have just found that this is now appended to Beutler’s post:
[Ed. Note: This post originally reported that, under Thune's calculations, the deficit wouldn't be eliminated for at least 10 years, when it would really be "more than 20." Beutler then revised the post to reflect sources that told him it would be 43, as it reads above. Upon yet further review, he added a late update that another reader thinks it will be 100 years.]
There is no way to tell who wrote that (perhaps they don’t really subscribe to the concept of a Best Practices Handbook at TPM?).
What is clear is that whoever wrote it doesn’t begin to understand the first thing about Beutler’s epic #mathfail confusion.
This anonymous editorial noter clearly believes that “more than 20 years”, 43 years and 100 years are three different answers to the same question. His or her view of events seems to be that Beutler originally (and mistakenly) wrote it will take more than 20 years to eliminate the deficit; some sources told Beutler that it should actually be 43 years, and he revised the post accordingly; then another reader came along and thought “it will be 100 years”, not 43, and so Beutler (in the very best fair-and-balanced tradition) faithfully reported that too.
(Implicit in the anonymous editorial noter’s note is the belief that there’s no way to tell whether the right answer is 43 or 100, so the best Beutler could do is report both.)
What our anonymous editorial noter misses entirely is that “more than 20 years” was supposed to be to eliminate the deficit (i.e., reduce it to a penny); 43 years is to reduce it to 1% of the original level; and that 100 years is what it would take to reduce the deficit from a hypothetical $1 trillion to $26 million.
This has really turned into some kind of corporate fiasco, hasn’t it? Or, in twitterspeak, a #groupmathfail? I shudder to think what might happen if someone else comes along and now tries to clarify the Ed. Note.
(If the Ed. Note was really written by David Kurtz, or at his direction, he should really have first taken me up on my offer to furnish more details. Whoever it was, jumped in half-cocked without understanding the first thing about the situation that he or she was writing about. Doesn’t exactly inspire much confidence in TPM, does it?)