The media is egregiously guilty of allowing people to get away with tossing out statistics and then printing them without even applying common sense to what was said. Here's an example from the news today:
Delegate Danny Marshall (R-Danville) doesn't seem to know (or at least use) basic arithmetic. At an August 21 political forum at Patrick Henry Community College, he said the General Assembly would have to raise gasoline taxes by 15 cents a gallon to collect the $61 million raised for transportation by the so-called "driver abuser fees."
I looked up state revenues and found that Virginia expects to collect in FY2007 $870 million for transportation from a tax of 17.5 cents per gallon of gas. Anyone hearing Marshall throw out his phony statistic wouldn't have to know the state's total tax receipts to wonder about Marshall's statement. If you could even "guesstimate" the state's per gallon gas tax, you would be able to think, as I did, "What??? I need to check that on the Internet"
Marshall is in the General Assembly. He gets copies of the budget. He should know what the tax on gasoline is. He should know the amount of revenue raised by that tax. I expect people serving in the House of Delegates to be able to use elementary math. (But, then, maybe he doesn't have to show any competence to get elected time after time...just look at George W. Bush.)
Actually, an increase of 2 cents per gallon would more than make up for the elimination of the fees, plus would be assessed on all drivers, not just Virginia drivers.
So, Del. Marshall, here's your arithmetic word problem. (Being a former teacher, I estimate it probably requires 6th grade math.)
"For FY2007, the Virginia Dept. of Taxation estimates that the tax on gasoline and diesel fuel will raise $870 million. The tax on gasoline presently is 17.5 cents per gallon in the state. How much revenue does each cent of tax raise? Rounded to the nearest cent, how much increase in the tax would be required to make sure you could raise $65 million? Remember, this is a two-part problem."
Del. Marshall can practice his division (i.e., divide 17.5 into $870 million) to figure out how much each penny raises. Then, he can use either multiplication or addition to figure out the secod part. He will also have to understand the concept of rounding off decimal numbers since we don't ask for a fractional answer to part two of the problem.
If I wanted to give him something really easy as his next word problem - just in case he had difficulty with the previous one - I could ask him this:
"How much less is Virginia's gasoline tax than the following states:
North Carolina's tax of 30.5 cents/gal.; Maryland's of 23.5 cents/gal.; West Virginia's of 31.5 cents/gal.; South Carolina's of 22 cents/gal."
Since that problem only involves simple subtraction of decimal numbers, it should be easy for him.
My classwork for the reported who wrote the news story would be this:
When politicians throw around statistics to cover their *** because they voted for something as unpopular as those "abuser fees," your job includes checking the numbers out. That's covered in Journalism 101.