Conservatives Can't Count

Counting is important: anyone who grew up watching Sesame Street knows that. Our friends in the Bush administration must have missed that part of the lesson. They hate to count. Especially when the results might make them look bad.

Some of Paul Krugman's most eye-opening columns in his collection The Great Unraveling—they're in section two, entitled "Fuzzy Math"—concern the way, once Bush became president, the government stopped counting certain things, or changed the methods of tabulation in order to score public relations points.

When Campaign for America's Future did our report on Toxic Trade, we wanted to know what percentage of America's toys are imported from China. We were forced, however, to take the toy industry's word on the matter—the Bush administration doesn't keep count.

When I began studying the administration's new Interagency Working Group on Import Safety report, I learned that the administration's panacea for all the rotten food being exported to us from countries with low safety standards is a "risk-based approach" to inspection—and that, though this sounds great in theory, in practice, it's impossible, because the government doesn't even keep count of the risks borne by the various kinds of foods we import.

Now I come upon this.

CBS news wanted to learn more about the problem of suicide among returning Iraq veterans. Here, first, is what they learned:

[I]t turns out little information exists about how widespread suicides are among these who have served in the military. There have been some studies, but no one has ever counted the numbers nationwide.

"Nobody wants to tally it up in the form of a government total," Bowman said.

Why do the families think that is?

"Because they don't want the true numbers of casualties to really be known," Lucey said.

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., is a member of the Veterans Affairs Committee.

"If you're just looking at the overall number of veterans themselves who've committed suicide, we have not been able to get the numbers,” Murray said.

So CBS went looking itself. In return, they—and the American people—received a slap in the face. They filed a Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of Defense for suicide numbers for the last dozen years:

Four months later, they sent CBS News a document, showing that between 1995 and 2007, there were almost 2,200 suicides. That’s 188 last year alone. But these numbers included only “active duty” soldiers.

CBS News went to the Department of Veterans Affairs, where Dr. Ira Katz is head of mental health....

Why hasn't the VA done a national study seeking national data on how many veterans have committed suicide in this country?

"That research is ongoing,” he said.

The "research is ongoing," and the check is in the mail.

So CBS went looking themselves. They were able to get state-by-state suicide data for veterans and non-veterans and compare them (how hard would it have been for the VA to do that? Not very.) They discovered, surprise, surprise, that Bush's Department of Veterans Affairs lied to them: of course there's an epidemic of suicides among returning Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.

Forty-five states sent what turned out to be a mountain of information.

And what it revealed was stunning.

In 2005, for example, in just those 45 states, there were at least 6,256 suicides among those who served in the armed forces. That’s 120 each and every week, in just one year.

Dr. Steve Rathbun is the acting head of the Epidemiology and Biostatistics Department at the University of Georgia. CBS News asked him to run a detailed analysis of the raw numbers that we obtained from state authorities for 2004 and 2005.

It found that veterans were more than twice as likely to commit suicide in 2005 than non-vets. (Veterans committed suicide at the rate of between 18.7 to 20.8 per 100,000, compared to other Americans, who did so at the rate of 8.9 per 100,000.)

One age group stood out. Veterans aged 20 through 24, those who have served during the war on terror. They had the highest suicide rate among all veterans, estimated between two and four times higher than civilians the same age. (The suicide rate for non-veterans is 8.3 per 100,000, while the rate for veterans was found to be between 22.9 and 31.9 per 100,000.)

Here's Dr. Katz answering the question if his agency was facing an epidemic of suicide: "There is no epidemic in suicide in the VA, but suicide is a major problem."

A major problem. That's what he calls suicide rates four times as high as the general population.

Watch him dodge when the reporter asks him for a yes or no answer to the question of whether suicide among veterans is at epidemic levels. Spin, spin, spin: "Suicide in America is an epidemic. And that includes veterans.

Conservatives hate to count. Because when they count, it shows America how badly they failed. They can't count, but they sure can weasel.

Anyone have any other examples to share?

Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future