Tangle - Your questions, answered.

I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”

Happy Friday!

Every day in Tangle, we solicit reader questions about politics and our work. And every few months, so many questions pile up on the back end that we decide to answer a bunch of them at once in a members-only reader mailbag. Today is one of those days.

We’re covering everything from questions about rates of autism to claims made by Bill Clinton in his DNC speech to whether there are stories we are scared to cover and, of course, some random personal questions about faith and what happens at a Tangle retreat. 

Please note: Every answer has been fact-checked and edited by the entire team, but we’ve also noted the lead responder in parentheses. We hope you enjoy it!

Q: Can you weigh in on President Clinton's claim, made during his speech at the DNC, that since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has added 51 million new jobs — and that 50 million of them have come during Democratic presidential administrations while 1 million came during Republican presidential administrations? Is it true, and what can we learn from this statistic?

— Geoff from Boston, Massachusetts

Tangle (Ari, managing editor): It’s true! But it’s also deeply deceptive. If you simply take the number of people employed in the United States at the end of an administration and subtract it by the number of people employed at the beginning of that administration, Republican presidents are indeed 50 times less effective at creating job growth than Democrats. Why is that deceptive? All you have to do is look at the employment chart from the St. Louis Fed to see:

When you graph the data, the most apparent trend is that the last two Republican administrations ended with economic catastrophe that the president at the time had almost no control over; if you want to argue that another president could have prevented Covid job losses or presaged and prevented the 2008 financial crisis, I would love to see you try. Democrats, meanwhile, took over recovery efforts following these losses. So of course their growth numbers from tip to tail look better. Conversely, you can see that hand-offs of successful economies — whether from George H.W. Bush (R) to Bill Clinton (D) or Barack Obama (D) to Donald Trump (R) — tend to spur their successors’ continued economic success.

Clinton’s claim is also deceptive because of the arbitrary starting point that he chose. The Berlin Wall fell on November 6, 1989, partway through George H. W. Bush’s presidency. The Bush administration had overseen steady job growth following the boom of the Reagan years up to that point, when the U.S. was hit with a mild recession. Economists can debate how culpable Bush (or Reagan before him) was for that downturn, but it’s not that fair to score only Bush’s job losses without crediting his or Reagan’s gains. The rest of the 1980’s up until the Berlin Wall fell look much sunnier (as you can see below), and when you decide to just put all that growth on the wrong end of your starting point, it’s not hard to end up with eye-popping numbers.

What can we learn from Clinton’s statistic? That math is a powerful tool, and it ought to be wielded with respect and care.

Q: My question is probably ridiculous, so please take it as a funny but sincere way to try to connect with you more personally. Have you considered being a Christian? And is there fundamentally a difference between all the different religions?

— Dwight, “digital nomad”

Tangle (Isaac, executive editor): This is only a little ridiculous, but I appreciate the curveball amid a bunch of political questions! No, I have never considered being a Christian. Fun fact: My dad’s side of the family has very strong Quaker roots, so much so that all my brothers, aunts, uncles, and cousins on that side still use “plain speech” pronouns when addressing each other (“thee,” “thy,” and “thine” instead of you, your, and yours), which is apparently not unheard of among the descendants of Quakers. My dad, who sang in his Episcopal church choirs since he was ten, went through a formal conversion to Judaism when he married my mom, though, so I wasn’t raised with a lick of anything other than Judaism.

I have a very deep connection to my identity as a Jew, my Jewish upbringing, and the simple fact that I can trace my ancestors back 2,500 years (and also say the same prayers they were saying). That, plus the history of persecution Jews have experienced, engender both a sense of loyalty and pride in me. 

As for fundamental differences: I’d say yes and no. In college, I took several religious studies classes and studied everything from Hinduism and Taoism to Christianity. I’ve read a few books making the case for Jesus Christ the messiah or giving a historical breakdown of Jesus the person (who absolutely existed). Obviously, Jews and Hindus believe very different things. Even Jews and Christians do. Even reformed Jews and Hasidic Jews do. Many sects inside religions are fundamentally different. So, yes, religions are fundamentally different.

Yet, at the same time, I do think there is a throughline: First, a belief, fundamentally, that there is something beyond our five senses out there we don’t understand, and probably a creator or creators of some kind. This is certainly my belief. And second, religions have a large and diverse community built around their beliefs.

Q: Has there ever been a topic that you decided was too controversial to write up? If so, do you now regret your decision?

Dave from Edmonds, Washington

Tangle (Isaac, executive editor): I’m proud to say: No. Never. There are certainly things I get nervous writing about (abortion, Israel, and trans issues come to mind), but we’ve never run from a story.

Q: How much can we depend on "election integrity" this year?

— Anonymous from Cibolo, Texas