Commentary by TrueDialog.org's Founder, Carl Lindemann

July 8 - Why the Bad Grades for the Maine Legislature? Part I

In Maine, the post mortem on the legislature continues on the state’s opinion pages. The first wave in the immediate aftermath was generally positive and congratulatory. Now, with distance, a more sober, somber assessment is coming forward. What’s written between the lines is how obstructionist PR tactics managed to derail much of the hard work done by the citizen legislature.

Two pieces in last week’s Portland Press Herald point to the troubles. Ron Bancroft’s “Lawmakers rate C-minus for the session: Legislators' good intentions weren't enough to come near the goals that looked within reach” pointed out the hard facts. Three out of four of the major challenges stalled while the fourth was watered down:

Tax reform and Dirigo Health reform floundered -- neither passed. Tax relief was a term used often but never put into practice…school consolidation finally passed in the bipartisan budget but as a mere shadow of its former self.

Bancroft got a great deal of visibility in the legislative session by penning opinion pieces about the business of government. He was a McKinsey consultant in the 1980’s before setting up his own shop in Maine.  The quality of his analysis in these pieces shows that McKinsey’s legendary reputation from that era was well earned. Reflecting true Yankee values, he is flinty and innovative and is grounded by accurate information, not ideology. 

Still, how the legislature slumped is something of a mystery for Bancroft. Throughout the legislative session he pointed time and again to what he sees as valid, informative study from the Brookings Institute. This offered a paint-by-numbers approach based on the kinds of data that gives the former McKinsey consultant confidence. “The state has the benefit of a clear, well-reasoned plan…the governor and legislative leaders have endorsed this approach, but they have done little to make it happen," he observes.  

Why the C-minus outcome?  He suggests that a go-along, get along attitude inspired by little electoral consequences is responsible for generating the inertia. Such institutional resistance typical to many organizations may play a part, but is that the whole story?

What about the use of deceptive public relations practices used to undermine the Brookings report?

When it was released last Fall, Maine Heritage Policy Center (MHPC) released Inconvenient Truth: Half-a-million dollar analysis from the Brookings Institution contains inaccurate data.

This “analysis” seeks to discredit one of the key findings of the Brookings report, something apparently damaging to MHPC’s agenda. Brookings found that “Maine’s per capita income now stands at an all-time high relative to the U.S. average.”

Inconvenient Truth attempts to show how this claim results from a flawed, possibly biased methodology. First and foremost, the study only uses data going back to 1955. The full data set from the Bureau of Economic Analysis goes back to 1929. Why leave out the earlier data? MHPC’s analysis shows that if you reach back, times are not as good as the Brookings study indicates. When you take off the rose-colored glasses from this flawed approach, the “all-time high” is exposed as a deceptive factoid, not a fact.

What’s wrong with adding the earlier data? The MHPC critique rests on reaching back to add what seem to be two boom times in Maine where the relative per capita income nearly matched the national average. Unfortunately, the “booms” MHPC wants to include came in 1933 and 1945. Yes, relative income was up in '33. Maine's natural resource-based incomes were relatively stable while the financial markets worldwide floundered in the pit of the Great Depression. Good times? The other “boom” in 1945 came from the near exhaustion in the shared sacrifice to win WWII. Is it a boom when everyone's broke? In terms of research methodology, these are unique historical episodes that do little to illuminate contemporary trends. Bookings was right to leave this data out and MHPC is wrong to suggest otherwise.

The fallacy of the MHPC approach is clear when you extend it to a reductio ad absurdem. The basic premise is that the bigger the data set, the better. If this is legit, why not extrapolate back to the Stone Age?  Then, Mainers likely enjoyed a the same relative income as their counterparts in, say, pre-historic Manhattan. More good times! 

Worse, the MHPC "analysis" suggests that Brookings' appropriate methodology is deliberate "cherry picking" with possible sinister motives:

One has to wonder about the motive behind the Brookings study’s deliberate truncation of data...This glaring mistake and data omission in the Brookings study also casts a long shadow on the study’s solutions for Maine economy.

If  Bancroft wonders why the legislature stumbled despite help from the Brookings study, looking at how MHPC worked to undermine the study's legitimacy is a good place to start. He can find the fruits of this poisoned tree in a reader's online comment (scroll to bottom of page, top of reader's section) about how the study is the blueprint for what sounds like a Communist takeover.

Next time, we’ll look at how Republican State Senator Peter Mills and Democrat Representative John Piotti, House chair of the Taxation Committee speak directly to how spin obstructed tax reform efforts in their piece “Sever tax reform from spending cuts.”

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