Circular logic from The Meck Deck

Today's Meck Deck blog, a division of the Art Pope Puppetshow, has a particularly good example of the use of circular logic. In a post titled "Smaller State Budget Means More Jobs", Jeff Taylor states

... to defenders of the status quo, who insist if you cut North Carolina’s taxes and shrink the state budget you are somehow impoverishing the state — and wiping out jobs. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The truth he speaks of leads right back to can you guess? You got it right. It leads you to a summary of a study, paid for by the John Locke Foundation that of course proves the author's point. Later in the same post he sends the reader to a press release on the John Locke Foundation website which has a more in depth look at the same John Locke Foundation paid study. Of course the solution is nothing more then trickle down economics with real rosy assumptions about how the businesses of NC are just going to go crazy because they now have more money to spend. Sound familiar, same crappy theory that they have been selling us for the last thirty years.

The study was done by the Beacon Hill Institute at Suffolk University in Boston. A quick check on "the Google" shows that the Beacon Hill Institute was founded in 1991 by Republican businessman and politician Ray Shamie and has accepted funding from Castle Rock Foundation, founded by the Coors family. Now the Coors family is famous for not just beer but for some of the most right wing views of politics. Funding was also received from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, a conservative foundation in Milwaukee, Wisconsin that helped finance research into President Clinton used by the right and helped finance the Project for a New American Century, PNAC, the infamous neocon organization that implored President Clinton to invade Iraq in the late 90's and counted among their members, Dick Cheney and many of the Bush Administration's members who "sold" the nation on an unnecessary war in Iraq.

So, they start with the premise that what the Republican NC House and Senate wants to do to NC will work, then find a willing conservative organization to run a computer model and voila, you get the numbers that prove your point. Intellectual honesty, I don't think so. My statistics and probability professor in engineering school warned us about this very thing, if you start with a premise that you want to prove, you can always find some way to make the numbers do whatever you want them to.