Paul Ryan says whatever to some votes at the Iowa State Fair.

Paul Ryan has been directly involved in the 2012 general election only a short time, but he seems bent on racking up as many fact-check stories as he can by November. Speaking to an audience at East Carolina University, Ryan claimed that 1.4 million businesses filed for bankruptcy in 2011, and that the economy under Obama has been worse than under Carter. Quote:

The president can say a lot of things and he will. But he can’t tell you that you’re better off. Simply put, the Jimmy Carter years look like the good old days compared to where we are right now.

“Simply put” is a verbal signal Ryan uses to warn his family to stop listening when he is about to lie, like when Sarah Palin says “gee” or “the.” It turns out that around 48,000 businesses filed for bankruptcy last year, not 1.4 million. It also turns out that fact checkers will jump all over a claim re: quantitative data that can be found on the internet within 30 seconds, and they did.

Don’t read Shushannah Walshe’s horrible lead. Do read the part where Ryan spokesman Brendan explains how, even though Ryan was off by a factor of 30 in his evidence, what he said was basically true:

He obviously misspoke, but it’s still an apples to apples comparison. The point remains: bankruptcies are up dramatically under President Obama compared to the Carter years.

That is true: it’s still an apples to apples comparison, except it’s one apple to one apple instead of 30 apples to one apple like Ryan said. And bankruptcies are up compared to the Carter years. There were around 44,000 business filings in 1980, compared to 48,000 in 2011. Of course, there were also 230 million Americans in 1980, compared to 311 million now—so there are 9% more business bankruptcies among a sample that is 35% larger. Also, such filings increased steadily during the Carter years, whereas business bankruptcies have dropped every year since Obama took office. They are, in fact, way down this year.

Paul Ryan is a numbers guy, but in this case, through no fault of his own, the numbers he used to present his case were either grossly inaccurate or extremely misleading. It’s the same thing that happened last time he spoke publicly, because he is unlucky. Despite his best efforts to prepare factually accurate arguments about why Mitt Romney should be president, he keeps accidentally misspeaking untrue statements that imply Mitt Romney should be president.

Probably, Ryan will not keep accidentally misspeaking in ways that help the Romney campaign—after two consecutive lies in two consecutive appearances, what are the odds?—so I consider the issue a dead letter. I would like to use our remaining space to point out another surprising trend in bankruptcy statistics since 1980. Beginning in 1984, the percentage of consumer filings as a portion of total bankruptcy filings goes up every year.

During the second year of the Reagan presidency, personal bankruptcies totaled about 82% of the oily, lint-filled bankruptcy pie. For the next three decades—through the boom years of the late eighties, the recession of the Bush era, and the renewed boom years of late Clinton and W Bush—they went up. They dropped about 2% during the present economic suckstorm, but the portion of personal bankruptcies remains much, much higher than it was 30 years ago.

Perhaps this trend gives the lie to the claim that what is good for business is necessarily good for most Americans. The economy has been up and down since Carter; business has done well and business has done poorly, yet through it all more and more of the entities that have done very poorly—that have found death in financial terms—have been people.

Maybe what we have here is not a maybe-correct and maybe-wrong economic theory that what’s good for GM is good for America, but a political and social climate that has consistently favored corporations over people. Maybe the proposition that making it easier on business is the best way to improve the economic lives of everyday Americans isn’t a theory so much as an excuse.

Maybe Paul Ryan looked at the wrong column of bankruptcy numbers—the one that happened to have the biggest, scariest figures in it—because he was not looking for data that he could use to form a conclusion. Paul Ryan has his conclusions already. What he needs is not data or even evidence so much as backup. He does not have a theory about the US economy. He has an agenda, and whatever he says to advance it—even when it is, you know, technically not true in terms of actual information—the point remains: he really wants you to vote for it. It’s still apples to apples.

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