Editor’s Scratchpad

Monday, April 9, 2001

A game of numbers

A truism of American journalism holds that two people can look at the same numbers or facts and come to quite different conclusions.

Take, for instance, the $1.2 trillion tax cut passed by the Senate last week. Pundits from The New York Times to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin saw that as a setback for President Bush, who had proposed a $1.6 trillion cut. The $1.2 trillion, however, was 75 percent of the president's request, not bad in a democracy where politics is the art of compromise.

Here at home, opponents of a power line across the Waahila Ridge have argued that they have wide support because they have gathered 3,000 signatures backing their cause. Assuming each signature represented a household of four people, that would be 12,000 people in Oahu, the population of which was 872,478 in 1998. The arithmetic says the opponents thus have the support of 1.4 percent of Oahu's residents.

--Richard Halloran

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