What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: Political Half-Truths

It’s an election year, so naturally there are virtual firehoses of misinformation pointed at potential voters. While there are encouraging signs that people are getting better at spotting misinformation, there’s a kind of “fake news” that seems particularly pernicious on both sides of the political aisle: drawing a conclusion based on omitted information or missing context. It’s a favorite tactic of politicians that explodes during an election year, so let’s dig into a couple of widely spread examples—one from the right and one from the left.

The picture above, from Snopes, who culled it from my aunt's Facebook page, is not Photoshopped and it's not a lie. The national average price of a gallon of gas really did dip to $1.77 in April of 2020. But the meme text suggests that this had somehow had to do with decisions Donald Trump made while in office.

The answer is always "supply and demand"

People like to discuss the reasons gas prices fluctuate, probably because we are confronted with it every time we go to the pumps, but whether you blame high gas prices on corporate greed, or credit low gas prices to Donald Trump being awesome, you're equally wrong. The main driver of gas prices is basic supply and demand. The real reason gas was so cheap in 2021 was a global drop in demand for petroleum caused by economic activity due to COVID-19 lockdown. It would not have mattered who was president; it's not like there's a lever in the Oval Office that sets commodity prices.

This isn’t to say that governmental policy has no effect on prices. The inflation spike of 2022 was caused in part by the $2 trillion American Rescue Plan signed in 2021. It’s complex and there are a lot of other factors at work, but as a general rule, supplying more money to the economy to prevent or reverse a recession results in inflation, but i it also causes the economy to grow and stay out of recession (a much worse result than higher inflation.) Again, it's supply and demand.

Politicians on both sides lie

It’s not just right-wing people who fall victim to the allure of jumping to conclusion fallacy though, though. Check out this chart posted on Twitter by Kamala Harris:

Like the right-wing meme, this chart isn't inaccurate or Photoshopped, but it leaves off the same thing the gas price photo omits: COVID. Most of the jobs “created” during the Biden administration were the result of people returning to work following lay-offs during the pandemic. Adjusted for COVID, the net job-gain from Biden’s first day until February 2024 was 5.5 million jobs. Nice work, but a lot less sexy-looking on a chart. 

During his State of the Union address, Biden said, "The only president other than Donald Trump that lost jobs during an administration was Herbert Hoover," which is half-true (maybe), but only if you ignore the economic devastation that COVID wrought, and also ignore that we don't really know the number of jobs lost during Hoover's administration—the Bureau of Labor Statistics didn't exist until after Hoover was out of office.

How the same numbers tell a different story

While Biden put an overly positive spin on his job numbers and bagged on Trump's, it’s possible to look at the same basic information and draw the opposite conclusion. At a speech on August 5th, Donald Trump said: “During Biden’s first 30 months in office, just 2.1 million new jobs were created, and by contrast, during my first 30 months in office we created 4.9 million new jobs.”

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, when Trump took office, there were 145.6 million non-farm jobs in the U.S. Thirty months later, there were 150.8 million (in a first, Trump gave himself slightly less credit than he deserved during this speech). When Biden took office, there were 143 million nonfarm jobs. By his 30th month in office, the number of nonfarm jobs had risen to 156.2 million. 

Trump isn't totally lying (this time)—he's trying to eat his cake and have it too. He gives Biden no credit for jobs that returned after the coronavirus pandemic, and assigns himself no blame for jobs that were lost due to COVID, limiting his assessment to the 30-month window of the Trump administration before COVID shook up the economy. As Dean Baker, co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research told Politifact, Trump is saying "everything that was bad is Biden's fault, whereas everything that is good would have happened anyhow.”

Spinning numbers to make yourself look better is nothing new, but what if you really want to know the truth? You probably can't.

Which administration has the stronger economy?

Despite polls showing Trump with an 11- to 20-point lead over Biden on the question of which candidate would better handle the economy, the economy did well under Trump, if you don’t take the shocks of COVID into account, and the economy is doing well under Biden, if you don’t assign blame for the COVID shock on Biden. (It also depends on what you mean by the economy "doing well.")

Even if you wanted to base your vote solely on which administration would be “best for the economy,” (instead of, say, which candidate is being tried for nearly 100 felonies) it’s probably not possible, even though we have recent data on how each handled it. The effects of public policy on the economy is such a complex subject, and there are so many people pushing so many agendas—weirdos sharing gas price memes on Facebook, vice presidents sharing slanted job charts on twitter—that it’s probably not possible to understand with any degree of certainty. Even if you devote your life to studying macroeconomics, other economists will have diametrically opposed views to yours.

This leaves us with tribalism and vibes, two factors that have probably always decided U.S. elections. If you're thinking "that's true of most politicians, but not my favorite one! They're a straight-shooter!" the wool has been pulled over your eyes. A political candidate who was really honest, who refused to engage in deception and self-puffery, would be dead in the water in any election larger than the local school board. Imagine a presidential candidate running on a platform of "There's not much I can do about the economy; it's supply and demand."