Wandering down rabbit holes to understand the mathematics of government

There are many difficult assignments in a newsroom, all with their own distinct challenges and discomforts. But the assignment facing our tax watchdog Jake Griffin must surely rank high among the most formidable.

The job comes with most of the usual hurdles facing reporters — sources difficult to reach or reluctant to talk, becoming so familiar with technical jargon you can translate it into the everyday language of newspaper readers, struggling to find the right place in a complex bureaucracy to find the information you need, relentless deadlines and more.

But it has an added component that undergirds Griffins’ work more substantially than that of other reporters.

Math.

Lots of math.

Journalists are often accused of choosing this profession specifically because they are not good at math. That is, in my experience, an error on two points. One, journalists are no more math averse than people in most other professions — except accounting or actual math, of course. And second, the implication that journalism work doesn’t require a good head for at least basic math is just patently absurd. Every government reporter must understand budgets and the means for comparing them from year to year. And, from the salaries of professional athletes to the quantities of ingredients in dinner recipes, mathematical concepts infiltrate almost every topic of public interest a newspaper addresses.

Despite this truth, journalism programs have long taught writers to do everything reasonable to avoid littering their stories with numbers. Readers, the thinking goes, don’t like math any more than journalists or anybody else, so clogging one’s stories with numbers, even stories that are based on numbers, only sends readers rushing for the comic pages or the comfort of an imprecise argument about government waste on social media.

So, Griffin’s daily responsibility is not just to find interesting or complex uses of taxpayer money, but to break them down into reports whose importance compels readers’ attention and whose details are easily understood.

His piece last week on the amount of state contributions to local governments was a classic case in point, and, for a time one afternoon, he and I shared space and a couple of laughs “down a rabbit hole” (his words) wrestling with a spreadsheet packed with years of data, our high school algebra and the particulars of state and local policy to ferret out (I know, different tunneling mammal) the numbers that would help him help readers to understand a controversy pitting local officials against state budget planners.

The controversy is one of those in which villains can be easily cast by either side in a simplistic assessment but are much less clear when details are examined carefully. Local governments grouse that the state is crippling them by taking away a grocery tax they receive. The state replies that it has hiked an income-tax kickback to local governments so that they are actually receiving substantially more in state money than they got from the grocery tax. The locals respond that the kickback is still substantially less than what they were getting 13 years ago. The state re-responds that it can’t afford a push to the full amount it used to rebate, but that the kickback is still the fairest way to reimburse local governments since not all of them have grocery stores, pot dispensaries or gambling revenues.

There are numbers attached to all of these arguments, of course, and indeed you can find yourself trapped in quite a rabbit warren trying to sort them out. In the end, Griffin did a masterful job on that score and then in laying out the various points so that even readers with no more mathematical prowess than a journalist could understand them.

Unavoidably, it did require you to follow along with some of the math, but hopefully it delayed your trip to the comics. Most importantly, it also did much to arm you better for those social media battles on government spending.

• Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is managing editor for opinion at the Daily Herald. Follow him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/jim.slusher1 and on X at @JimSlusher.