Some things just don’t add up, and some unfortunately do
Mark Twain had it right when he talked about the three most deceptive ways public policy can be influenced — “lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
Both the public and we journalists seem to have irrational fear of rational numbers. Reuters news service begins one of its guides for journalists with a formula: “Reporter + Number = Error.”
At the risk of Reuters’ wrath, this reporter did some readin’ and ’ritin’ ’bout ’rithmatic this week and came up with a few possibly challengeable conclusions.
If you’ve been cursing the rising price of gasoline and diesel fuel because America misjudged whether to bomb Iran, you’ll have to come up with stronger curse words that might make even a sailor blush when you open utility bills later this month.
Since 2019, we at the newspaper have been recording Marion County’s heating and cooling degree-days — good indicators of utility costs. Measurements aren’t precise, but trends are compelling.
For June, July, and August, we’ve had 19.9% more cooling degree-days than average for that period since 2019. In July and August alone, they were up 31.7%. For just August, they were up 42.8%.
The sticker shock coming with future electric bills is likely to be more extreme than that of postage rates to mail them. This August’s cooling-degree days were 79.3% higher than last August’s. And the painful levying of that cost will come just in time to soften the way for property tax increases.
While pondering the shock over electricity, we also were shocked to hear that the National Football League plans to open its season with a game in Australia, 7,921 miles from the nearest team playing in the game. Not only is it far, far away. It’ll be blacked out except on the Netflix streaming service.
Shaking my head over that, I glanced at fall sports schedules for county teams. Nicholas Kimball does a fine job tracking down all the coaches for all the sports in all the county’s school districts and documenting their preparation with photographs that we wish you could see on the pages of a slick magazine like Sports Illustrated.
Stuck in a numbers mindset, I started calculating just how far sports teams would travel this fall. Combined, Marion teams will travel more than 4,500 miles on 39 different roundtrips, excluding any playoffs. That’s more than a trip to Disneyworld and back. If you’re one of the lucky workers who gets IRS mileage for travel, that’s $3,450 in expenses for just one person in a regular car.
No one except fans of the movie “Hoosiers” wants community pride to suffer because varsity teams can’t compete with teams from similar-sized schools. But must our junior varsity, C team, and middle school teams also travel? Could they make do with scrimmages among the four other schools in the county or even intramurals? Town pride is not at stake in their contests, which are designed more to provide practice for kids who eventually will represent their communities as varsity athletes.
The cost of buying fancy buses and filling them with overpriced fuel only starts to tell the story of all this travel. At a time when experts are lamenting declining proficiency standards in our schools, sports travel involves massive amounts of time spent away from classrooms and homework.
Kids of that age are under strict limits regarding how many hours they may work in part-time jobs. Shouldn’t similar limits apply to how much time they can spend traveling to and from sports events?
Some people may think of these as lies or damned lies, but they aren’t. They’re just statistics. And, of course, anyone can interpret them any way he or she wishes.
Whether they’re right or wrong, at a time when we’re preparing for governments to impose ever-increasing tax burdens, shouldn’t they be something we at least think about?
It may be better to think about these things than it is to think about all the silly allegations being aired on political commercials paid for by big-money interests outside the state.
One candidate for governor, for example, says he will lower property taxes. The question is, why hasn’t he done so already?
State law gives governors absolutely no authority over property tax rates. The state legislature, where he serves as a leader of a veto-proof majority, does play a role. And the biggest role is played by friends and neighbors who serve on town councils, school boards, and boards of county commissioners — not in the governor’s mansion.
Statistics may or may not be lies or damned lies. But there’s no doubt about the claims being made by billionaire-bought commercials.
Perhaps it isn’t so much a case of “Reporter + Number = Error” as it is “Election + Ads = Dysfunctional, Out-of-Touch Government.”
— ERIC MEYER