On Monday, Talmadge Heflin issued a statement in response to the Comptroller’s biennial revenue estimate. Later in the day, Heflin wrote a “Speaking Freely” post on “the myth of the $27 billion shortfall,” which contained a thorough refutation of the dollar figure cited in some media accounts.
This morning, a project called Politifact – which in Texas operates under the umbrella of the Austin American-Statesman – applied its “truth-o-meter” to the closing statement of Heflin’s blog post, in which he concluded that claims of a $27 billion budget shortfall “are flat-out false.”
Somehow, Politifact concluded that Heflin’s statement was “false”. For real?
Virtually all of Politifact’s judgment depends on a single viewpoint – that of the organization that issued the $27 billion estimate. Politifact’s analysis of Heflin’s comments was told in a highly simplified fashion that neglected to mention key facts. The core of the article consists of 422 words defending the $27 billion methodology. Heflin’s defense of his original statement and response to the $27 billion clarification is combined into a single paragraph at the end.
The Politifact article omitted TPPF’s response to its initial e-mail inquiry – not even making it available to its readers as reference material. It also omitted all details from the methodology discussion during a lengthy phone call between Politifact’s writer and Heflin.
For example, both Heflin’s blog post and TPPF’s initial e-mail response point out that Comptroller Susan Combs’ revenue estimate did not factor for the mid-cycle reductions to the 2010-11 budget ordered by the state leadership. The official implementation of these already-approved cuts will increase the available general revenue in the next budget by almost $2 billion, offsetting any shortfall estimates by at least that amount – and more if those cuts are to recurring obligations.
This by itself validates Heflin’s statement. Yet this essential point is mentioned nowhere in the Politifact article.
The cherry-picking of details did not end there. The Politifact item only cites news accounts that used the $27 billion estimate, neglecting to reference news outlets that qualified the $27 billion figure or used other estimates. But news reporters are not a primary source for stories; they merely convey the information they have been provided by others, which is routinely taken and presented at face value. While the Statesman repeated the $27 billion figure, other outlets such as the Dallas Morning News did not rely on that figure as a given fact.
The Politifact item is correct on one point: Heflin’s Monday blog was based on initial news accounts and his conversations prior to the biennial revenue estimate press conference with his counterpart at the Center for Public Policy Priorities. The blog was posted before he had seen their press release and backup materials. Had Heflin seen their methodology beforehand, he would have added a slight qualification to his original statement but still reached the same conclusion.
Heflin’s bottom line: if someone wants to come up with a budget shortfall – in this case $27 billion – there is always a way to do that. But that depends on which assumptions are used to craft a budget. While this approach may be theoretically defensible, Heflin’s 22 years of experience in the Texas Legislature and his service as the House’s lead budget writer the last time Texas faced a significant shortfall, has taught him that such assumptions are rarely useful or applicable in the real world of budget development.
And sure enough, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst noted this morning that some groups claimed that the 2003 budget shortfall was almost $16 billion (see comments at 4:50 and 6:55 marks). The 2003 budget shortfall has been accepted by our organization and every media outlet over the last eight years as being $10 billion. The group touting the $16 billion shortfall figure – 60 percent higher than what has been generally accepted – is now putting forward the $27 billion estimate. The analysis deemed to be flawed for almost a decade is the standard for “truth” today?
Our sense: To paraphrase the Bad News Bears, “never assume anything…”
– David Guenthner