Sunday, May 19, 2013

Peggy Noonan? Meet Nate Silver...

...and have a seat, madam.  The plural of anecdote is not data on the whole IRS thing, and who better to explain that to one of our more factually-challenged Village numbskulls than the Swami of Statistics himself as he takes Peggy to task.

Some conservatives, however, are alleging that there is another component to the scandal. They accuse the I.R.S. of targeting not just conservative groups that sought 501(c)(4) status, but also individual taxpayers who oppose President Obama or have supported conservative causes. “The second part of the scandal is the auditing of political activists who have opposed the administration,” the Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan wrote on Thursday, describing the I.R.S.’s actions as the “worst Washington scandal since Watergate.”
What evidence does Ms. Noonan present for this second allegation? She reports on four cases of conservatives who she says were targeted for audits, and infers that there were undoubtedly many more ...

If Nate Silver is asking you for evidence, you don't have it.   What follows is glorious.

Ms. Noonan is surely correct that many conservative taxpayers were audited. In fact, based on some simple math that I’ll present in a moment, it’s likely that hundreds of thousands of Mitt Romney voters were selected for an audit in 2012.

However, it’s also likely that hundreds of thousands of Mr. Obama’s supporters were audited. Although the percentage of taxpayers who are audited is relatively low — about 1 percent — the number of taxpayers in the United States is so large that this still yields well more than a million audits every year, across the political spectrum.

Here's the key chart of data from Nate.





That's right:  the vast majority of people audited by the IRS make less than 200k.  Half of those audited make less than $25k.  In other words, if anything, the IRS regularly audits more taxpayers making little or no income because...hey, people who make little or no income far outnumber the people making millions each year.

Matching those exit poll numbers up with the data shows if anything, the IRS audited 100,000 more Obama voters.

This of course means Peggy Noonan is full of nonsense, because she found four people who got audited who voted for Romney...four out of 879,000.  Of course you can find four.  Congratulations, you're still a moron.


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