Fact-checkers who can’t keep facts straight perform no service.
When a group of National Public Radio reporters tore into the Oct. 3 presidential debate like sharks on a tuna carcass, one of them thought he smelled Mitt Romney’s blood.
In an exchange about oil and gas taxation, President Barack Obama had repeated his pet howler about $4 billion of “corporate welfare” supposedly enjoyed by big oil companies. He even stretched the fabrication.
“Basically,” he said, “they get deductions that those small businesses that Gov. Romney refers to, they don’t get. Now, does anybody think that ExxonMobil needs some extra money?”
Romney pointed out that the Department of Energy estimates oil industry tax breaks—mostly deferrals—at $2.8 billion/year.
One of NPR’s fact-checkers said Romney “low-balled a bit” on the subject of “oil subsidies.” According to DOE, he said, “they’re closer to $4 billion a year.”
Wrong.
The DOE’s Energy Information Administration estimates tax preferences of the oil and gas industry at Romney’s number.
The higher figure comes from the Treasury Department in Obama’s annual proposal to eliminate industry tax preferences. The administration proposal includes measures available to other industries and thus can’t be considered “oil subsidies.”
Although the attribution error is small, it has big consequences. Most NPR listeners probably now disbelieve everything Romney said on the subject.
That’s regrettable. The challenger heroically tried to point out that many of the tax measures politicians routinely disparage as “subsidies” in fact represent industry-specific “accounting treatment” in place for “a hundred years.” But Obama interrupted him, saying, “It’s time to end it.”
Obama wouldn’t want anyone knowledgeable to fact-check his pronouncements on oil industry taxation. Informed scrutiny would show that most beneficiaries of industry-specific tax measures are, in fact, small businesses, mainly independent producers and royalty owners.
The tax measures Obama would repeal that most help major oil companies—the manufacturer’s deduction and foreign tax credit—apply to international companies in other industries.
So, thanks to fact-resistant fact-checkers, a populist fiction endures.
(Online Sept. 5, 2012; author’s e-mail: [email protected])