While working on my last post, about right-skewed distributions, I thought again of an article that Norm Coleman, who represents my person but not my views in the U.S. Senate, once wrote for the Minneapolis newspaper. It really annoyed me and maybe I can now exorcise it at last.
(I've tried to link to Coleman's article, but it is too old to be available at the newspaper's website. I can't find it at Coleman's site, either. At the time, I wrote a letter to the editor that cited June 1, 2003, as the publication date. The details I refer to below are from my letter.)
The article concerned the Bush tax cut that was then being debated. In urging support, Coleman referred repeatedly to how much taxpayers would save, "on average." He asserted, for instance: "Taxpayers will receive, on average, a tax cut of $1,126." I don't doubt that the arithmetic was done and that the ratio of tax savings to taxpayers equalled $1,126. But, as opponents tirelessly pointed out, the savings accrued mainly to the wealthy. Bush himself would have saved $44,500 on his 2001 return if the "reform" he was proposing had then been law. That's more than a lot of hard working people earn in a year, but it is still peanuts compared to the $600,000 that, according to Financial Times, would have been the windfall received by John Snow, who at the time was Bush's Secretary of the Treasury.
Coleman's formulation was meant to seduce the average Joe into thinking he'd get something like the "average" saving. But it is the fantastic savings accruing to the very rich that made the "average" (mean) saving as high as $1,126. More than half of all taxpayers received less than half of Coleman's "average" saving. In this case, the median was the message--unless your goal was to deceive.
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