Where Did He Get Those Figures?

G.O.P. front runner seems to pluck facts from thin air

Peter Hannaford, a graying California public relations executive, looked perturbed. There stood his longtime friend and star client, Ronald Reagan, addressing a crowd of 2,000 cheering supporters at a convention hall in Kansas City, Mo., last week, and he was using those same old figures about John Kennedy's "30% tax cut." Said Reagan: "In the very first year, the Government got $5.8 billion more in total revenue."

Just offstage, Hannaford collared a young Reagan aide, the only researcher traveling with the Reagan campaign team. "Where did he get those figures?" asked Hannaford. "Are they from the Treasury Department?"

"I don't know," said the researcher. "I think he got them from [Congressman] Jack Kemp."

"Well, check it out," said Hannaford.

Kemp, a possible Reagan vice presidential nominee, is the sponsor of the Kemp-Roth bill, which would cut federal income taxes by 30% over three years, and possibly that is what inspires Reagan to talk repeatedly of a 30% Kennedy tax cut. In actual fact, Kennedy in 1963 only asked for an 18% tax cut, and Congress authorized 19%.

Minor discrepancies? Quite apart from the substantive merits of his views, Reagan consistently documents them by misusing and misstating factsa fact that disturbs many of those in his entourage. Taxes have become a major theme. "History shows," he declared in Connecticut Jan. 17, "that when the taxes of a nation approach about 20% of the people's income, there begins to be a lack of respect for government. . . When it reaches 25%, there comes an increase in lawlessness." History shows no such thing. Most Western European nations have long had tax rates far higher than that, and higher than U.S. rates, but with lower crime rates. Similarly, Reagan likes to portray himself as a tax cutter, citing as evidence that he rebated $5.7 billion to Californians when he was Governor. True enough, but the rebates came as a result of Reagan's increasing taxes by $21 billion, including a quadrupling of the state income tax.

Reagan's misstatements cover a wide range. Some examples: > Reagan claimed: "The General Accounting Office listed 41 separate items of waste and fraud in Government totaling $11 billion. That's $11 billion that could be eliminated right away." Reagan's figures apparently come not from a GAO report but from a study by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, which estimated $7 billion of waste and fraud in HEW, most of which consisted of unnecessary health care. > Reagan claimed: "It costs HEW $3 in overhead to deliver $1 to a needy person in this country." The correct amount, according to HEW, is not $3 but 12-c-. > Reagan claimed: The Federal Government has increased by 131,000 employees in the past three years. The actual increase: 60,000. > Reagan claimed: The windfall profits tax would cost 1 million bbl. in the U.S. a day in lost production in the first year. The U.S. Government estimate: 100,000 bbl. per day. > Reagan claimed: HEW threatened to cut off funds from a Bellingham, Wash., school because teachers were spanking more boys than girls. The threatened cutoff actually involved a school in Bellevue and concerned unequal athletic facilities as well as disciplinary violations. > Reagan claimed: Americans could "have cheap gasoline again by lifting Government restrictions" on the oil industry. Not even the oil industry would buy that.

Along with the unfounded facts, there are the unfounded accusations. In Florida, for example, when an anti-Castro Cuban journalist asked him what he would do about federal harassment of Cuban refugees, Reagan denounced it. When other reporters later asked him for any evidence of such harassment, he could not provide any, though he kept insisting that it occurred. In Kansas, similarly, Reagan declared: "I have been told that some of the Iranians coming to this country are here to create disturbances and to form terrorist groups, and immigration officials know this because of some of the things they found in their luggage, yet the State Department has said to the immigration people, 'Don't rock the boat.' " Once again, reporters asked Reagan for evidence of the charge; he was unable to provide any.

Perhaps the most interesting example of Reagan's curious way with facts came when he was asked in Kansas whether he supported 100% parity, a formula that pegs the price of grain to an index of what various consumer goods cost in 1914. To oppose parity in Kansas is considered somewhere between blasphemy and heresy, but Reagan's answer was almost as bad: "I have to confess to you that I'm not as familiar with that as some things." Pressed the next day, he admitted: "I know more about it than I indicated there." The trouble was that he actually had long opposed 100% parity. "I want to see farming out in the free market," he said, and as for the questioner in Kansas, "I didn't want to say a flat no. I certainly wasn't going to say a flat yes."

Reagan himself attributes his slipshod practice to his years on the lecture circuit, when any newspaper story provided him with fodder. "Like any other speaker," he told a CBS interviewer, "I'd see something, and I'd say, 'Hey, that's great,' and use it." Others attribute Reagan's mistakes to poor staffing. Unlike other candidates, he has no well-organized "issues staff" producing accurate position papers or correcting errors. From his loose network of conservative consultants, he has had only two major briefings this year on domestic issues, the last one before the debate in Nashua, N.H., on Feb. 23. "We're like an amoeba," Hannaford says of the Reagan brain trust. "We're constantly dividing and re-forming into policy groups. We operate a lot by conference telephone calls."

The disturbing point, though, is that Reagan not only makes repeated misstatements but goes on making them even after being publicly corrected (as with his exaggerated claim that Alaska has more oil than Saudi Arabia). The misstatements have proved effective; the crowds have cheered, and the voters have pulled the Reagan lever. The big question: Do the facts, after all, really matter?

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