Yesterday, Senator Ted Cruz said the following: “On tax reform, we, right now, have more words in the IRS code than there are in the Bible — not a one of them as good.”
Now it seems like an indisputable and relatively harmless thing for a Republican politician to have said, as the tax code is about 3.7 million words long, or almost five times the length of the Bible. But would you believe that the it was subject to a Washington Post “fact check”? Behold, possibly the dumbest media fact check in history:
Cruz makes the point that tax policies need to be drastically simplified, and many Americans likely would support that sentiment. But such a crude comparison, which provides no nuance or context, doesn’t capture why the tax code has become so complex and how it affects taxpayers.
In a way, comparing the raw word count in the tax code to the text of the Bible diminishes the real frustration that taxpayers feel, and the real impact that can occur from improper tax filings. The consequences of not filing your taxes is of far bigger concern than not reading the Bible — legally speaking, anyway. We can’t speak to possible eternal damnation.
Well, I don’t know about eternal damnantion either, but taking a statement that is literally true and and asserting it lacks “nuance or context” is a serious journalistic sin. And Ted Cruz is not just technically correct. He’s trying to explain the length and complexity of the tax code — a problem the fact checker doesn’t dispute, by the way — using a comparison that ordinary Americans can understand. How on earth can anyone so overthink this, let alone declare it a “nonsense fact” and assert that Cruz is somehow diminishing “the real frustration that taxpayers feel”? (Note: This is not the first time the Post’s Michelle He Lee has tried to make this absurd “context” argument before under the guise of fact checking.) For those of us that live in the real world where the words of benign sentiment such as this have a plain meaning, Cruz’s point is obvious enough. That it’s disputed says a lot more about the fairness and honesty of “fact checkers” than it does Ted Cruz.
Or as it says in the good book, judge not lest ye be judged. And it’s impossible not to conclude that the Washington Post is seriously wanting here.
