Telling stories with numbers

Every one of us spends some amount of time each day looking at statistics or numbers or charts. Whether it's stats on your favorite sports team, competing polls relaying American's opinions on health care reform, or the little electricity-use chart on your utility statement, we absorb a lot of data throughout the day.

And every one of us, including organizations and businesses, uses data and numbers selectively to tell stories. It's exciting to tell your spouse you just found an amazing designer jacket marked down 75 percent (!) but not so exciting when your spouse sees it still cost $350. An oil company will tout that it spends $600 million a year on researching renewable energy (!) but not tout that only makes up 1 percent of their profits.

When it comes to budgets and taxes, the stories you can tell with numbers are almost endless. Depending on how you splice and dice the data, you can probably make a case for any story you want to tell.

Rep. Ross Hunter points this out on his blog where he briefly describes why tax rankings can vary so much, even when those rankings come from the same organization.

You see this selective use of numbers in our current budget debate, too.

When you look at the entire 2009-11 biennium budget, you see that we'll be making about $4 billion in cuts with $800 million or so in new revenue. That's about $4.40 in cuts for every $1 in new revenue.

Our colleagues on the other side of the aisle, however, like to tell a different story. They argue we're proposing only about 1 percent, or $653 million, in cuts while raising $800 million in revenue.

Well, if you're looking at just the 2010 supplemental budget, this is true, but misleading. You don't hand out medals to relay runners based on their individual times, but on their cumulative time. It's the same thing with our budget - the only numbers that really matter are the totals at the end.

Which, hopefully, we'll get to soon. We'll keep you posted.