As raging wildfires continue to torment Southern California, estimates of the total economic loss have ballooned to more than $250 billion, making it one of the most costly natural disasters in U.S. history.

Early estimates by AccuWeather and JP Morgan put the damage in the $50-billion range, but the expected toll quickly rose to more than triple that amount as fires spread through neighborhoods in Altadena, Pacific Palisades and Malibu.

In the last two days, hundreds of weary firefighters have battled multiple fires in the hills around Los Angeles and Ventura counties, including a massive blaze near Castaic, an early morning fire in the Sepulveda Pass that threatened the tony communities of Brentwood and Bel-Air, and another that pushed into Ventura County farmland Thursday morning.

The latest estimate from weather forecasting service AccuWeather puts the total expected damage and economic loss to between $250 billion and $275 billion. That includes the costs of damage, loss of life, healthcare, business disruptions and other economic impacts.

“These fast-moving, wind-driven infernos have created one of the costliest wildfire disasters in modern U.S. history,” AccuWeather Chief Meteorologist Jonathan Porter said in a statement. “Hurricane-force winds sent flames ripping through neighborhoods filled with multi-million-dollar homes. The devastation left behind is heartbreaking, and the economic toll is staggering.”

Multiple fires have already scorched thousands of acres in and around Los Angeles, displacing more than 150,000 people who have had to evacuate or lost their homes, and damaging or destroying more than 15,000 structures. The number of confirmed dead is 28.

The Palisades fire burning in an area from Santa Monica to Malibu has swept through some of the most expensive real estate in the country, with median home values over $2 million. It may become the worst wildfire in modern California history based on the number of structures burned and economic loss, Porter said.

Estimated financial costs surpass the damage and economic loss numbers for the entire 2020 wildfire season, which was a very active U.S. wildfire season, Porter said.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 has been the most expensive U.S. natural disaster to date, costing an estimated $200 billion.

If you are wired into the flow of campaign news — as I am, for my sins — you will be inundated this week with reports of a new analysis of the fiscal impact of the economic proposals of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.

Long story short: Trump’s would be much worse in terms of increasing the federal debt than Harris’. According to the study issued Monday by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, Harris’ policies would expand the debt by $3.5 trillion over 10 years, Trump’s by $7.5 trillion.

These are eye-catching figures, to be sure. They’re also completely worthless for assessing the true economic effect of the candidates’ proposals, for several reasons.

One is the committee’s single-minded, indeed simple-minded, focus on the direct effect of the proposals on the federal deficit and national debt. That’s not surprising, because (as I’ve reported in the past) the CRFB was created to be a deficit scold, funded by the late hedge-fund billionaire Peter G. “Pete” Peterson.

For instance, the CRFB has been a consistent voice, as was Peterson, in campaigns to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits on the preposterous grounds that the U.S., the richest country on Earth, can’t afford the expense. (Peterson’s foundation still provides a significant portion of the committee’s budget.)

This focus on the national debt and the federal deficit as a linchpin of economic policy dates back to the 1940s among Republicans and the 1970s among Democrats. Throughout that period it made policymaking more austere and left the country without the resources to combat real economic needs such as poverty while increasing inequality.

The harvest, as economist Brad DeLong of UC Berkeley has noted, was the rise of a policy that failed everyone but the rich. Trump would continue that policy; Harris would continue the Biden administration’s effort to return the U.S. to a government that serves all the people.

Another problem with the analysis is that the candidates’ proposals are inchoate — as the committee acknowledges. The committee cobbled together their purported platforms from written policy statements, social media posts, and dubious other sources and then absurdly claimed that its effort helped to “clarify [the] policy details.”

The worst shortcoming of the CRFB’s analysis is that it’s hopelessly narrow. Its focus is on the first-order effects of the individual proposals on federal income and spending, without paying much attention to the dynamic economic effects of those policies. Would the policy spur more growth over time, or less?

The committee estimates the direct cost of Harris’ proposal to extend and increase the health insurance subsidies created by the Affordable Care Act and improved by the Biden administration at $350 billion to $600 billion over 10 years; but what would be the gains in gross domestic product from reducing the cost of healthcare for the average household?

The committee barely even acknowledges that this is a salient issue. It says that in some of its estimates it accounts for “dynamic feedback effects on revenue and spending,” but also says, “we do not account for possible changes in GDP resulting from the candidates’ policies.”

The committee’s treatment of Trump’s tariff proposals demonstrate the vacuum at the heart of its analysis. It treats the income from Trump’s proposal — a 10% to 20% tariff on most imported goods and 60% on Chinese imports — as a revenue gain for the federal budget. Economists are all but unanimous in regarding tariffs as a tax on American consumers, however — in other words, a tax transferring household income to the Treasury.

The committee writes: “Such a significant change to trade policy could have economic and geopolitical repercussions that go beyond what a standard tax model would estimate.” As a result, “the true economic impact is hard to predict.” Thanks for nothing.

Uncertainties about the details of the candidates’ proposals resulted in laughably wide ranges in the committee’s fiscal estimates. The effect on the deficit and debt of Harris’ proposals is estimated at zero to $8.1 trillion over 10 years. For Trump’s plans, the range is $1.45 trillion to $15.15 trillion. What are voters or policy makers supposed to do with those figures?

The CRFB also reports a “central” estimate for both — $3.5 trillion expansion of debt for Harris, $7.5 trillion for Trump — but doesn’t say much about how it arrived at those figures, other than to say that sometimes it just split the difference between the high and low estimates, and sometimes relied on estimates of the individual proposals by the Congressional Budget Office and the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation.

I asked the CRFB to comment on the shortcomings listed above, but haven’t received a response.

Despite all that, the CRFB analysis showed up on the morning web pages of major newspapers and other media coast-to-coast on Monday, as though its conclusions were credible, solid and bankable. (Here at The Times, we passed.)

Consider the CRFB’s treatment of Trump’s deportation policy, which he has called “largest deportation program in American history,” affecting at least 11 million undocumented immigrants and millions more who are in the U.S. legally.

The committee says that might increase the deficit by anywhere from zero to $1 trillion over a decade, with a middle-of-the-road estimate of $350 billion — “chiefly,” it said, “by reducing the number of people paying federal taxes.” It also cites unspecified “additional economic effects of immigration.”

The CRFB might have profited from reading an analysis of the deportation proposal produced in March by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, which was also funded by Pete Peterson but, staffed by economic eggheads with a wider intellectual horizon, tends to take a more intelligent approach to economic policy.

“The immigrants being targeted for removal are the lifeblood of several parts of the US economy,” the institute observed. “Their deportation will … prompt US business owners to cut back or start fewer new businesses, … while scaling back production to reflect the loss of consumers for their goods.”

The institute cited estimates that a deportation program in effect from 2008 to 2014 cost the jobs of 88,000 U.S. native workers for ever one million unauthorized immigrant workers deported. Arithmetic tells us that, in those terms, deporting 11 million immigrants would cost the jobs of about 968,000 U.S. natives.

“The disappearance of migrant workers … dries up local demand at grocery stores, leasing offices, and other nontraded services,” the institute reported. “The resulting blow to demand for all workers overwhelms the reduction in supply of foreign workers.”

The institute was a lot more free-spoken than the CRFB about the effect of Trump’s proposed policies on economic growth. Considering only the deportations, tariffs, and Trump’s desire to exercise more control over the Federal Reserve System, it concluded that by the end of Trump’s term, U.S. GDP would be as much as 9.7% lower than otherwise, employment would fall by as much as 9%, and inflation would climb by as much as 7.4 percentage points.

An overly sedulous focus on deficit reduction as economic policy has caused “real harm [for] the nation’s most vulnerable groups, including millions of debt-saddled and downwardly mobile Americans,” economic historian David Stein of the Roosevelt Institute and UC Santa Barbara wrote last month. When it became Democratic orthodoxy under Presidents Carter and Clinton, the party pivoted to “‘Reagan Democrats’ and suburbant white voters at the expense of the labor and civil rights movements.”

As the federal government pulled back, “state budgets were ravaged,” Stein wrote. State and local services were slashed. The efforts to control federal debt forced households to take on more debt.

The deficit scolds are still at it and still have vastly more credibility than they deserve. That’s clear from the CRFB’s analysis and the alacrity with which it was republished as “news” Monday. Efforts to turn policy back to the point that it benefits everyone, not just the rich, still have a long way to go in this country.

If you’re making a list of big news stories of 2023, here’s one you might want to check twice: The surge in “organized retail crime,” or gang shoplifting.

I’ve written before about the news media’s fixation on this phenomenon despite the unreliability of retailers’ claims about it, and especially when compared with the much more prevalent crime of employer wage theft, which gets almost no coverage.

But there’s been a recent development on the topic, which demands your attention. Put simply, the retail lobby has admitted that its most eye-catching and widely publicized statistic about it is a lie.

The statistic, published in April by the National Retail Federation, was that “organized retail crime” — including the videotaped flash mob smash-and-grab events aired in frequent rotation on the cable and evening news shows — came to more than $45 billion a year.

Specifically, the NRF declared that organized crime accounted for “nearly half” of the $94.5 billion in retail “shrink” attributed to theft or “other causes” in 2021. The claim appeared in the latest edition of the federation’s annual report on organized retail crime.

On Dec. 4, the federation acknowledged that its estimate was a fabrication and it “updated” its report to remove the estimate.

But the damage had been done. Politicians at the federal and state levels jumped on the original report to push legislation aimed at fighting the onslaught of thieves.

In October, Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) staged a “Fight Retail Crime Day” event on Capitol Hill, at which he stood next to NRF executives to push bipartisan legislation to create a Center to Combat Organized Retail Crime in the Department of Homeland Security.

Donald Trump, in a speech to California Republicans on Dec. 1, called for shoplifters to be shot on sight. “We will immediately stop all of the pillaging and theft,” he said. “Very simply: If you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store.” His audience greeted this policy initiative, such as it is, with applause.

News organizations also swallowed the NRF’s assertion whole, partially because it fed into the perception, assiduously retailed by the retailers’ lobby, that the retail trade was suffering “unprecedented levels of theft coupled with rampant crime in their stores,” as an NRF official put it in September. “The situation is only becoming more dire,” he added.

The Washington Post editorial board, drawing on the NRF claim and a string of recent thefts in its suburban backyard, declared that “‘shoplifting’ is too mild a word” for what was going on and that “no community, it seems, is immune from the recent spike in organized retail crime.” The board called on Congress to pass Grassley’s measure, but quick.

The editorial writers cautioned that law enforcement would have to contend with thieves displaying “undeniable smarts,” though since the theft ring they mentioned in their piece had been caught in part because its getaway car got caught in traffic, the level of their brainpower might have been deniable after all.

Let’s examine how this particular claim got conjured up. This is a useful inquiry, because we in the modern world are inundated by manipulated or factitious statistics, fabricated by marketers and politicians, promoted on social media and swallowed whole by news organizations.

The goal of statistic-mongers might be to promote an ideological viewpoint or undermine accepted science, as when fossil fuel interests manipulated statistics to make it seem that global warming wasn’t happening.

Sometimes it may be to get attention, which seems to be the case with those annual estimates by the consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas of the productivity losses suffered by employers during the March Madness college basketball tournament ($17.3 billion this year, supposedly); one look at the firm’s methodology shows that it’s assembled from conjecture built upon conjecture built upon conjecture, all adding up to absolutely nothing verifiable.

One of my favorite examples of the media running with an unverifiable statistical claim involved the seminal pornographic movie “Deep Throat.” The producers of a 2005 documentary asserted that “Deep Throat” had grossed $600 million, which they said made it the most profitable movie in history. Among the evidence they cited was that so much cash rolled in from theaters that the movie’s mob-connected backers couldn’t count it all, but weighed it in bags instead.

As I pointed out, no one said how many bags there were, or their size, what denominations were inside, or indeed how much they weighed. All we knew, I wrote, was “that a bag of $1 bills weighs exactly the same as a bag of hundreds, and that each weighs less than a bag of horse manure,” which I thought was in the bags the documentary makers were selling.

That brings us back to the numbers for organized retail crime. As I’ve reported before, and my colleague Sam Dean painstakingly documented in 2021, the figures published by big retailers and the retailers’ lobbyists have always been squishy in the extreme.

For one thing, the industry tends to obscure the difference between “shrink” and shoplifting, organized or otherwise.

“Shrink” encompasses internal theft — pilferage or embezzlement by employees — as well as what retailers call process and control failures, such as paperwork glitches and other mixups that result in their losing track of inventory; and external theft, such as individual shoplifting and those mass invasions of shops by gangs.

All too often, comments about shrink are taken by reporters or laypersons to refer to those organized raids (and retail lobbyists seldom make the effort to correct the misimpression). Yet in its own 2022 report, the retail federation itself attributed only 37% of all shrink to shoplifting — not half.

So how did the erroneous estimate come about? It was the product of a process akin to that childhood game “Telephone,” in which a statement evolves as it’s passed from player to player, eventually bearing little resemblance to the original.

In this case, it began with Nov. 2, 2021, testimony to a Senate committee by Brendan Dugan, a CVS executive who was also president of the National Coalition of Law Enforcement and Retail (CLEAR), which is composed of law enforcement officials and corporate security executives.

Dugan told the committee that CLEAR estimated that “organized retail crime accounts for $45 billion in annual losses for retailers.” That became the go-to figure for the toll of organized shoplifting, but as Dugan later acknowledged to Daphne Howland of RetailDive, the specialty retail news site that originally outed the error, it had come from the NRF’s own 2016 report on shrink; as it happens, $45 billion was the federation’s estimate of the loss in 2015 from all shrink, not just shoplifting.

The NRF and the co-author of its 2023 report, the corporate risk consultancy K2 Integrity, evidently didn’t realize that the $45-billion figure came from its own report, or that it was already eight years old, or that it referred to total shrink. They simply accepted it as gospel, calculated its mathematical relationship to the $94.5 billion cited as the cost of total shrink in 2021 — i.e., “nearly half” — and injected it into the publicity and news bloodstream. Voilà!

The news organizations that participated in this cabaret should be ashamed of their gullibility. Some, such as CNN, have expressed appropriate skepticism. The Post corrected its editorial to reflect the NRF’s update, though its deputy opinion editor, Charles Lane, told Judd Legum of the Popular Information blog that although its editorial writers “relied on the NRF data in good faith, not knowing it was erroneous,” they stood by their policy prescriptions.

Yet why should anyone rely on the NRF data, given the industry’s obvious incentives to exaggerate the truth about organized shoplifting and obscure the facts?

Big retail chains have been using claims about mob shoplifting to obscure why they’ve been closing stores in some neighborhoods. Target has attributed closings of stores in Seattle, New York and San Francisco to crime, although in some cases those neighborhoods have been shown to have lower shoplifting rates than locations left open. The real issue, in other words, may be that the retailer made a mistake in locating these stores and is trying to blame local residents, rather than its own executive decision-making.

Shrink, reduced to shoplifting, has become an all-purpose defense of executives tasked with explaining to investors why profit and margin growth may have slowed. For example, at Dick’s Sporting Goods, which has pushed the shrink narrative hard, Chief Financial Officer Navdeep Gupta told Wall Street analysts on Nov. 21 that the “shrink headwind” had pared about a half-percent from the firm’s profit margin on merchandise.

The company’s third-quarter earnings report told a more detailed story. There, Dick’s reported that margins had decreased by 1.3 percentage points — well more than double the impact of shrink — due to “higher markdowns … on excess product.” In other words, margins narrowed more because of faulty buying decisions made internally than from thefts committed by workers or marauders.

“We continue to invest in efforts to keep our stores, teammates and athletes safe,” Gupta told investors, suggesting an image of workers holed up behind barricades against interlopers, like the characters in “Night of the Living Dead.”

The lesson from all this is clear: Statistics that businesses put forth to suggest a crisis that politicians should respond to with legislation and investors should sympathize about must never be taken “in good faith,” because they’re almost never offered in good faith.

They’re concocted to advance a narrative. Anyone who forgets that is asking to be played for a sucker.