The Romney “150,000” Quote

In his speech to the NRA, Mitt Romney said:

Will Rogers famously said that he worried whenever Congress was in session. Today, our freedom is never safe — because unelected, unaccountable regulators are always on the prowl. And under President Obama, they are multiplying. The number of federal employees has grown by almost 150,000 under this president.

For centuries, the American Dream has meant the opportunity to build something new. Some of America’s greatest success stories are of people who started out with nothing but a good idea and a corner in their garage. Today, Americans look at what it takes to start a business and they don’t see promise and opportunity. They see government standing in their way.

The trouble, as the Washington Post‘s Fact Checker points out, is that Romney’s statement strongly implies that the “almost 150,000” extra federal employees are “unelected, unaccountable regulators.” And, according to the Post‘s numbers, that increase in federal employees was by no means limited to regulators; over half the increase was in the military and in federal hospitals (mostly military and veterans’ hospitals). The non-military, non-federal-hospital increase was less than 70,000 people, and it seems likely that many of those weren’t “regulators,” either.

Don Surber (Daily Mail) criticizes the Post criticism, among other things on the grounds that “Mitt did not say all 146,000 new employees were regulators. He said the number is multiplying. I think we all agree that adding 9,000 new regulators to implement Obamacare is a multiplier.” But note how the passage begins by talking about “regulators,” repeats the reference (“they”), and then tries to connect that category to the only number that’s given, which is “almost 150,000”:

[U]nelected, unaccountable regulators are always on the prowl. And under President Obama, they are multiplying. The number of federal employees has grown by almost 150,000 under this president.

That seems to me a pretty strong implication that the number of regulators has increased by almost 150,000. To defend Romney’s statement on the grounds that it is literally accurate seems to me to miss the mark, given the likely inaccurate implication that it would convey to a reasonable listener. And this is especially so given that this is an oral statement, which the listener might not be able to critically and carefully parse.

I made a similar point with a different example in the Using Evidence Correctly chapter of my Academic Legal Writing book:

Guns, one article says, “produce a toll of over 35,000 killed every year and hundreds of thousands more raped, robbed, and assaulted in firearms-related violence.” Quick: About how many gun murders were there in 1995, the year that the author was likely talking about? [Note that the numbers have fallen considerably since 1995.]

“Well,” you might say, being a careful reader, “we don’t know; the 35,000 might include manslaughter, too.” You might even realize it includes accidents, though you may have been distracted from that by the context, which focuses on “violence” and crime. So how many gun murders, manslaughters, and accidental killings were there, put together?

The answer, it turns out, is 17,500. Why? Because 18,500 of the over 35,000 were suicides.

Of course, some readers may believe that suicides should be considered on par with homicides or fatal accidents in determining the costs of gun possession — but others might not. The readers should make this decision for themselves, based on nonmisleading information. In the context of a sentence where the most explicit descriptions are of violent crime (“raped, robbed, and assaulted in firearms-related violence”), many readers will infer that the less explicitly defined term “killed” also refers to criminal killings. This is especially so because the typical reader will be reading the sentence quickly, rather than thinking closely about the various possible literal definitions of each word.

So when you write a sentence, think whether some readers may read it as making a different claim than the one you’re trying to make. In particular, think about what assumptions readers may make based on the context, and make sure those aren’t the wrong assumptions.

What’s true with regard to the 35,000 number strikes me as equally true with regard to the 150,000 number.

Thanks to InstaPundit for the pointer.

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