Numbers tell a story, but rarely without help.

The latest eye-catching figure was $1.6 million per day – the estimated cost to taxpayers for a National Guard deployment in Chicago.

Perhaps you first encountered that number on social media, stated as fact, or balanced against how else such a sum could be spent to improve the city. Maybe you moved along – that’s mostly what I do – but this data point provided an excellent opportunity to dig past what friends posted in search of source material.

Enter the Chicago Sun-Times, which headlined that number in a Friday report, but began to introduce useful context: the dollar amount is an estimate, based on expenses from past actual deployments as well as on a guess of 3,000 troops, another guess.

The source is the National Priorities Project, which the paper identified first as a nonpartisan federal budget research organization. I’m often guilty of seeing the word “federal” and making that a synonym for “government,” but in this case, it just describes the scope of NPP’s work, so it was helpful to see it also identified as falling under the “progressive” Institute for Policy Studies, a nonprofit, nongovernmental organization.

And to the credit of both the Project and the newspaper, there’s no obfuscation: in addition to guessing at the deployment size, the $530 per diem expense also is an estimate. That’s the rate the Project used when trying to calculate the cost of a 2020 deployment in Washington, D.C. So, on top of inflation, it’s also important to factor in the pay rate of the actual members clued into duty and if the feds pay for their housing during deployment.

It takes an awful lot of screen taps to get to that information from your average Instagram story slide, and that’s only if there’s a link in the first place. (And, not for nothing, at least in my feeds, it’s fewer clicks to find someone appalled by the baseline number as well as someone else asserting “this is exactly what I voted for in November.”)

Of more concern than the potential expense is the likelihood that if such a deployment occurs, we’ll probably never have a good handle on the actual cost, which severely limits an assessment of potential benefits.

And it’s not just hot-button political issues that raise questions: Capitol News Illinois recently analyzed Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity numbers showing the NASCAR “Chicago Street Race had a $128 million economic impact in 2024, according to state contracts,” which is the kind of story that helps convince lawmakers to keep allocating tourism dollars but also requires educated guesswork.

Research always bests reactivity: you’ll never go wrong moving past spin to track down original information.

• Scott T. Holland writes about state government issues for Shaw Local News Network. He can be reached at sholland@shawmedia.com.