Politicising Statistics: Crime and the Defense Budget

Both sides of the political aisle attempt to manipulate crime statistics. When the Democrats are in power and making noise about gun violence, the Right will downplay it. And yet more typically the Right will scream about law and order and the Democrat's inability to rein in the chaos.

As Biden has just recently starting speaking about guns, we'll see if the Right shifts gears. The Right's narrative thus far (just over a year into his presidency) has been to emphasize the supposed crime wave and the chaos. I've already related other incidents in which FOX viewers are shocked to find that the cities they expected to be in chaos and flames are in fact completely normal.

Some of the crime numbers have recently trended upward. Since Covid, the number of murders has increased. It's true, and yet those numbers were already at historic lows and so while they've trended upward, they're still well below average and certainly far below where the statistics were at in the 1970's, 80's, and the early 1990's. It's not even close.

I frequently hear about how New York City has become unsafe and I know of people who are terrified to travel there. FOX has them convinced they'll be gunned down. Yes, the numbers are up. 468 people were murdered in New York City last year (versus 319 in 2019) and yet given that in 1990 the tally was over 2,200 – we need to get a little perspective. Some of these same people were visiting New York during the 1990's and didn't give it a second thought.

Additionally while there was a fairly sharp increase from 2019 to 2020 – 2021 saw 488 murders, indicating the increase had all but stopped and the situation has stabilised.

Of course other crimes have plummeted. Some of this is also due to the anomaly of Covid. During the lockdowns there were almost no burglaries taking place and so any uptick will appear (statistically) as an increase.

There are serious social problems and certain cities like Chicago have seen more of an increase (over several years), but even current numbers are down from the death tolls seen in previous decades. The reasons and problems are complex and it's far bigger than some FOX talking point about District Attorneys who are easy on crime or reforms of the highly corrupt and unjust bail-bond system.

The same game is frequently played with the US Defense Budget. The budget exploded under Reagan and then with the conclusion of the Cold War there were cuts, but even the much criticised Clinton-era cuts only reduced the budget back to what America was spending during Vietnam. Though it must be admitted the math does get tricky because inflation has to be factored in, which is not always easy to do.

Then under George W Bush the budget exploded once more ($335bn to $696bn) and approached levels not seen since World War II. Obama cut the budget (from $721bn in 2010 to $610bn by 2013), leaving it still almost double what it was when George W Bush took office and yet the Right screamed that he was decimating the military and making America weak. It's absurd on every level, a politically-motivated manipulation of statistics. And as stated elsewhere, the Defense Budget doesn't even begin to cover the totality of American military spending. The true number is massive to the point of incredulity – somewhere over a trillion dollars a year at this point, a tally that more or less equals every other nation on Earth combined. This reality has only changed in recent years as China has started to seriously invest in its military.

Don't be fooled by disinformation and spun statistics. It only takes a few minutes of looking into these things to realise what's happening and how these news outlets are manipulating the information.