Brendan Nyhan

AP takes a stand on Social Security and race

Good for the Associated Press -- rather than writing another "he said"/"she said" article that fails to educate readers, national writer Matt Crenson has published a story that takes a clear stand on the facts. Contrary to President Bush's claims, Crenson finds, Social Security experts believe that the program is not a bad deal for African Americans. Here's the key graf:

On balance, the program may actually benefit blacks more than whites, according to analyses by the AARP, scholars such as Liebman and the Social Security Administration's actuaries. Only the conservative Heritage Foundation has concluded otherwise.

As the bubbles used to say in the old Batman: Wham! Punch! Slam! This is very encouraging stuff. With Social Security rising to the top of the national debate, let's hope other papers pick up the ball and run with it rather than just reporting Bush's claims in the "he said"/"she said" style.

Update 2/2: Andrew Grossman of the Heritage Foundation has added a comment stating that others besides Heritage have "concluded otherwise" about the net benefits of Social Security for blacks and whites. I'd agree that Crenson's wording should have been more precise, but I think his point was that among the group of serious, original analyses only Heritage has found that Social Security is a bad deal for blacks. That may or may not be true (I don't know), but I assume Crenson did some research on it. I checked out the Cato study (PDF) that Grossman references, for instance, and it appears to be largely derivative of other studies, including Heritage's. Anyway, I'd welcome pointers to other examples.

Update 2/8: Grossman sent me an NBER working paper from 1983, which is not exactly current, but it appears there are multiple studies reaching a similar conclusion to Heritage. See the "What Other Literature Tells Us" section of this AARP analysis, among others, for citations and critiques.

The Gonzales/RFK contradiction

Democrats who oppose Alberto Gonzales' nomination to be Attorney General are frequently citing the talking point that he's not independent enough, as in this McClatchy Newspapers story:

"By refusing to voice his own values and understanding of the law, he has failed to demonstrate the independent leadership he will need as the nation's chief law enforcement officer," [Senator Dianne] Feinstein said.

As with Rice, Democrats said that Gonzales was too loyal to Bush. Democrats said Gonzales' personal ties to the president damaged his ability to pursue allegations of wrongdoing involving administration officials and their supporters.

But almost every Democrat venerates John F. Kennedy, whose brother Robert was probably the least independent attorney general ever when judged in terms of "personal ties to the president." To my knowledge, Chuck Schumer of New York is the only Democrat to address the elephant in the room - here's what he said during a committee hearing last week:

[T]he position requires a greater degree of independence than, for example, the secretary of State, whose obligation is to advance the president's interests abroad. When the White House asks the Justice Department, Can we do X? -- the Justice Department is charged with giving an objective answer, not one tailored to achieve the president's goals. The bottom line is it's hard to be a straight shooter if you're a blind loyalist.

There are two models for an attorney general, loyalist and independent. We all know that there have been attorney generals over the years who have been close to the president. There is no better example than our colleague's brother, Robert Kennedy, who served his own brother, President Kennedy. That said, no one ever doubted in the confines of the Oval Office that Bobby Kennedy would oppose his brother if he thought the president was wrong. History has documented those disagreements.

Judge Gonzales is more of a loyalist than an independent. That alone certainly doesn't disqualify him, but it raises concerns. After an extensive review of the record, unfortunately and sadly, and despite my great personal affection for the judge, his testimony before the committee turned me around and changed my vote from yes to no. He was so circumspect in his answers, so unwilling to leave even a micron of space between his views and the president's, that I now have real doubts whether he can perform the job of attorney general.

In short, Judge Gonzales still seems to see himself as counsel to the president, not attorney general, the chief law enforcement officer of the land.

I'm sure RFK and his brother had their disagreements in private, but this is hardly a convincing distinction. If independence is important in an attorney general -- and it probably is -- then that applies to RFK as much as Gonzales.

For me, Ed Kilgore of New Donkey makes the strongest argument against Gonzales, which is goes far beyond just the independence issue:

Gonzales doesn't represent the truly hard cases on torture; he stands for the proposition that anything not explicitly prohibited by the administration's extremely narrow interpretation of U.S. law and international treaties is just aces with him. And as a Washington Post editorial yesterday noted, after stonewalling the Senate Judiciary Committee on the subject initially, in his final hearing he squarely confirmed that this was indeed his position.

If you believe, as I do and I hope you do, that the war on terror is an ideological war in which perceptions of American values and good intentions are in the long run as important as military assets, then confirming the Poster Boy for Torture as Attorney General provides a propaganda victory for Islamic Jihadism that's potentially just as damaging as those images from Abu Ghraib. Moreover, Gonzales's confirmation will also reinforce the already dangerous impression that the United States will only obey those rules we get to set ourselves, an impression the administration finds ways to strengthen nearly every day.

Add it all up, and for me at least, the calculus is pretty clear: this guy should not become Attorney General, on the merits, and completely separate from the politics of the thing.

Fred Barnes on the dissent-silencing beat

Andrew Sullivan catches the Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes pushing the White House to try to silence dissenters on Iraq:

BARNES ON DISSENT: Fred Barnes is fighting mad that the Dems may be getting tougher in obstructing the president's agenda. He thinks the tactic will backfire and will prompt the Dems to lose more seats in 2006. But we can't wait till then! Here's his recipe for White House response tactics:

Stronger countermeasures will be needed, including an unequivocal White House response to obstructionism, curbs on filibusters, and a clear delineation of what's permissible and what's out of bounds in dissent on Iraq.

Harrumph. Harrumph. One quibble: the White House will determine what constitutes "permissible" dissent? I assume he means that some dissent will merely be described as treason by the White House. They won't actually try and stop such expressions, will they? Still, it's an interesting insight into the mentality of some Bush defenders. It seems to me that if an opposition party wants to mount an obstructionist campaign, it has evey right to do so. And face the consequences. It's called a democracy. You know: like we're trying to foster in Iraq.

"Merely be described as treason"? Sullivan, who frequently suggested that dissenters were committing treason before he began to question the war in Iraq, appears to be covering his ass here. Attacks on dissent are hardly a minor matter, particularly coming from the White House (see Chapter 6 of All the President's Spin for the Bush administration's first term record of using these tactics).

In any case, when journalists are calling on the government to silence dissent, we've truly reached a new low in our political discourse.

Yesterday in Iraq

I want to briefly note the bravery of the Iraqi people yesterday. When we study political science in academia, it's easy to lose sight of the magic and power of democracy. The fact that so many Iraqis risked their lives to exercise a right we take for granted is simply incredible.

The question now is what this all means. The situation over there is still incredibly difficult, but the election gave me some hope, at least, that catastrophe can be avoided. I think Slate's Fred Kaplan put it best:

Few sights are more stirring than the televised images of Iraqi citizens risking their lives to vote in their country's first election in a half-century, kissing the ballot boxes, dancing in the streets, and declaring their hopes for a new day of democracy.

And yet, the challenges and uncertainties that seemed so daunting last week—about Iraq's security, society, and governance—are unlikely to turn less daunting next week, next month, or the month after.

Yes, as President Bush said in his address this afternoon, the Iraqi people showed the world they want freedom. But this has never been in doubt. The real questions of democracy are what people want to do with that freedom, whether their contesting desires and interests can be mediated by a political order, and whether they view that political order as legitimate. Voting for leaders is a vital but very early step in this process.

...[I]s it too romantic to see signs of real hope in today's election? One thing is clear: The day marked a terrible defeat for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who had declared democracy to be an "infidel" belief. He and his goons passed out leaflets threatening to kill anyone and everyone who dared to vote; they dramatized their threat by killing dozens of police and poll workers in the days leading up to the election. And yet millions of Iraqis—including a fairly large number of Sunnis who live in Shiite areas—defied their fears and voted. Whatever mayhem they inflict in the coming days, it will be hard for anyone to interpret their actions as reflecting the beliefs of "the street."

The problems with blog triumphalism

Reynolds' post illustrates two of the biggest problems with the blog triumphalism being peddled by various acolytes:

Blog factionalization - The ecosystem of blogs is increasingly balkanized. It's hard work to push against your own ideological inclinations, and most people don't do it very often, especially after writing a blog for a long time. In addition, there are substantial incentives to develop a consistent brand to encourage repeat visitors, and the way to develop a brand is usually to deliver opinion from a consistent ideological perspective, which draws visits from readers and links from bloggers who share those views.

Over time, we see increasing clustering by ideology, with Kos, Marshall, Atrios, etc. in one network and Sullivan, Reynolds, Powerline, Belmont Club, The Corner, etc. in another. Of course, everyone filters the information they receive, accepting some points and discarding others; the problem is when like-minded communities start mostly talking to each other. The result is that their views usually become more extreme. This is what Cass Sunstein calls the law of group polarization in his book Republic.com, and while things haven't become nearly as bad as he predicted, the phenomenon is clearly at work in communities of right- and left-wing blogs that constantly feed each other horror stories about their opponents that are taken as representative.

For example, Reynolds is constantly being sent -- and linking to -- negative posts and articles about the left, and posts very little counter-stereotypical material. Similarly, he freely admits that he filters out bad news from Iraq since he believes the media already covers it.

The incentives for bad polemics - As Matthew Yglesias wrote in a great post last year, writers who make inflammatory, misleading or wrongheaded arguments attract vastly more controversy and attention than those who make good ones. Bad arguments generate many responses from the other side (Yglesias cites Michael Moore and Samuel Huntington as examples of this), while good ones are strategically ignored. Andrew Sullivan, for example, can be a brilliant writer (see his early work on gay marriage), but his blog writing gets so much attention in large part because it's both interesting and almost totally unfiltered, which leads to lots of mistakes, retractions and so forth. A "love him or hate him" personality cult arises, and the audience swells. Reynolds writes quick, cutting posts as well, and this has clearly boosted his audience for the same reasons. Further down the blog food chain, a similar dynamic applies -- ridiculous "Fiskings" and other lousy polemics are often the best way to generate readership and links from top bloggers.

I still believe in the potential of blogs - as we wrote in All the President's Spin, the blog culture of fact-checking can help correct inaccuracies in the mainstream media. But this depends on (a) blogs doing credible fact-checking and (b) careful filtering of it to sort the actual mistakes from the ideological garbage. If blogs are mostly peddling nonsense, they'll get tuned out.

(Notes: In the interest of disclosure, Glenn was a good friend to Spinsanity; I don't mean to pick on him in particular. Also, as a political scientist, I have a real appreciation of the importance of ideology in bringing coherence to politics, but it has obvious and important downsides as well.)

Correction watch

The LA Times is running a correction in the middle of the online article where the original error appeared. Good for them. Slate's the only other major publication I've seen doing this as a general practice - that needs to change.

Meanwhile, even though it published articles using two conflicting definitions of the term, the Washington Post appears to have not run a correction, clarification or explanatory article on the interrogration procedure known as "waterboarding." I emailed the reporters in question and ombudsman Michael Getler, but to no avail. Jeffrey Smith responded to me directly, but that's not the same thing as clarifying the issue for the record in print.

Insta-stereotypes

After discussing a Colorado professor who compared 9/11 victims to Adolf Eichmann, Glenn Reynolds lets the stereotypes and misinformation fly:

When Ted Kennedy can make an absurd and borderline-traitorous speech on the war, when Michael Moore shares a VIP box with the last Democratic President but one, when Barbara Boxer endorses a Democratic consultant/blogger whose view of American casualties in Iraq is "screw 'em," well, this is the authentic face of the Left. Or what remains of it.

Calling Kennedy's speech "borderline traitorous" is a hell of a charge to make without any supporting evidence. When did it become illegal to disagree with Reynolds on the conduct of the war in Iraq? (The Wall Street Journal makes a similar suggestion that Kennedy is hoping for American failure today; more cheap shots here.) And of course, the "Democratic consultant/blogger" is Markos Zuniga of Daily Kos, who was talking about the killings of American mercenaries, not military casualties (he's actually a veteran). What Zuniga said is still deeply disreputable, but Reynolds is misrepresenting it.

The larger problem, as Max Sawicky pointed out in a post on this same subject, is the rush to stereotype based on a handful of extreme, unrepresentative examples. This is becoming a pervasive habit of mind in the spin culture precisely because it's effective, but it's deeply damaging to reasonable democratic discourse.

Update 1/30: To clarify, I disagree fundamentally with Kennedy's speech. The presence of US troops is obviously helping to fuel the insurgency, as he says, but it seems clear that pulling them out on the timetable he advocates would create a power vacuum leading to civil war. That's a stupid idea -- and one Kennedy expressed at a terrible time -- but it's hardly traitorous.

Bad coverage of Boxer v. Rice

When Senator Barbara Boxer said to Secretary of State nominee Condoleezza Rice on January 18 that "I personally believe -- this is my personal view -- that your loyalty to the mission you were given, to sell this war, overwhelmed your respect for the truth," a statement that made quite a bit of news, you would think that reporters would present readers with an evaluation of the evidence in question. You would be wrong.

Boxer actually made specific charges. After the much-quoted line above, she said, "And I don't say it lightly. And I'm going to go into the documents that show your statements and the facts at the time." Then she laid out several pieces of evidence - Rice's use of the inflammatory phrase "mushroom cloud" to suggest that Saddam Hussein might soon attack the US with a nuclear weapon; contradictions between her pre- and post-war statements about how quickly Saddam could acquire a weapon; her claim that Saddam's pursuit of aluminum tubes proved the existence of a nuclear program; and her assertions about the relationship between Al Qaeda and Iraq.

Whatever you think about Boxer, Rice or the war, these are substantive points that reporters should at least mention and clarify for readers. Without endorsing Boxer's specific statement, I will point out that we document a number of misleading, inflammatory or false claims that Rice made before or after the war in All the President's Spin (see the Rice index entry). The issue of what she said before and after the war deserves attention and debate.

Instead, though, we got superficial coverage of the faceoff as a substance-free partisan clash or a dramatic catfight (an approach mocked on "The Daily Show"). Here's Glenn Kessler's entire account of Boxer's statement in the Washington Post on January 19:

In one especially heated exchange, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) quoted from Rice's statements before the war about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction -- which were never found -- and all but accused Rice of lying about the rationale for war in a zeal to promote the conflict.

A Lexis Nexis search of the "major newspapers" category shows that only two ran news stories in the immediate aftermath of the hearing that even mentioned the aluminum tubes issue or the phrase "mushroom cloud" - the San Francisco Chronicle and Baltimore Sun on the 19th (the LA Times published a transcript of the exchange on the same day). A few more did so later -- the Christian Science Monitor (1/24), Washington Post (1/26) and the LA Times (1/26) -- but it was too little, too late. In short, the press failed... again.

"Anarchy, State, and Rent Control"

I just read Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia for the first time for a seminar on liberal democracy, and while I'm a non-libertarian who disagrees with most of his positive arguments, it's brilliant. Nozick was also a wonderful writer (a special delight after slogging through John Rawls' A Theory of Justice), and the combination of his intellectual and rhetorical genius is absolutely devastating when he's taking on cant and bad arguments. Given my Spinsanity background, I can't help but love it.

Reading Nozick also reminded me of a hilarious New Republic article from the 1980s documenting how this passionate libertarian extorted more than $30,000 from his landlord by exploiting rent control laws of the sort that he decries philosophically. It doesn't undermine the strength of his arguments, but it certainly casts him in a much poorer light. Check it out.

Call for more troops

A bipartisan letter to the Congressional leadership in the Weekly Standard calling for a major expansion of the military - amen! (link via Kevin Drum). The key passage:

The United States military is too small for the responsibilities we are asking it to assume. Those responsibilities are real and important. They are not going away. The United States will not and should not become less engaged in the world in the years to come. But our national security, global peace and stability, and the defense and promotion of freedom in the post-9/11 world require a larger military force than we have today. The administration has unfortunately resisted increasing our ground forces to the size needed to meet today's (and tomorrow's) missions and challenges.

So we write to ask you and your colleagues in the legislative branch to take the steps necessary to increase substantially the size of the active duty Army and Marine Corps. While estimates vary about just how large an increase is required, and Congress will make its own determination as to size and structure, it is our judgment that we should aim for an increase in the active duty Army and Marine Corps, together, of at least 25,000 troops each year over the next several years. There is abundant evidence that the demands of the ongoing missions in the greater Middle East, along with our continuing defense and alliance commitments elsewhere in the world, are close to exhausting current U.S. ground forces. For example, just late last month, Lieutenant General James Helmly, chief of the Army Reserve, reported that "overuse" in Iraq and Afghanistan could be leading to a "broken force." Yet after almost two years in Iraq and almost three years in Afghanistan, it should be evident that our engagement in the greater Middle East is truly, in Condoleezza Rice's term, a "generational commitment." The only way to fulfill the military aspect of this commitment is by increasing the size of the force available to our civilian leadership.

Are Kristol and Krauthammer innocent?

Media Matters and other liberal pundits have been attacking Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post and William Kristol of the Weekly Standard for allegedly serving as "consultants" for the inaugural address and then praising it on TV without disclosing their role. The claim is based on reports from the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post that were ambiguously worded:

LAT: "As they drafted the speech this month, White House political aide Karl Rove and chief speechwriter Michael Gerson held a two-hour seminar with a panel of foreign policy scholars, including several leading neocons — newspaper columnist Charles Krauthammer, Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins University and Victor Davis Hanson of Stanford's Hoover Institution — according to a person who was present."

WP: "One meeting, arranged by Peter Wehner, director of the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives, included military historian Victor Davis Hanson, columnist Charles Krauthammer and Yale professor John Lewis Gaddis, according to one Republican close to the White House. White House senior adviser Karl Rove attended, according to one source, but mostly listened to what became a lively exchange over U.S. policy and the fight for liberty."

But it turns out that Kristol and Krauthammer may not have been giving advice on a speech. In the Post, Fred Hiatt seeks to refute the charge:

As to Krauthammer, he has gotten a bum rap. He has been described as "consulting" on Bush's inaugural address and then praising it. But Krauthammer was invited to the White House with a small group of academics and commentators to discuss Middle East policy; though a speechwriter was present, the inaugural address was not on the agenda and, according to several participants, Krauthammer never discussed it. He wasn't paid. And when he commented on television (not in his column) on the speech, he was not being entirely complimentary when he called it revolutionary and radical.

And Editor & Publisher's reporting yielded a similar response. Will Media Matters and the other accusers deal with this evidence, or just ignore it? Maybe the participants in the seminar should have disclosed that they were there, but in terms of journalistic ethics, taking part in an informal policy discussion and consulting in the preparation of a speech are not the same thing.

Update 1/31: Media Matters has posted a new article on Kristol and Krauthammer pointing to contradictions between the defenses posted above and the passage below from a Howard Kurtz story:

KURTZ: Liz Spayd, the paper's assistant managing editor for national news, said: "We stand by the story we wrote. We have a firsthand source who says it was crystal clear a primary purpose of the meeting was to seek advice on both Bush's inaugural and State of the Union speeches."

But ombudsman Michael Getler's depiction of the writing points back to ambiguity:

GETLER: The meeting was held on Jan. 10 and the White House invitation concerned a discussion of "American foreign policy at it relates to the Middle East." Among the questions to be discussed were: "What should this Administration do/say more of -- and what should it do/say less of? What are the key, achievable goals we should aim for during the next four years?" Presidential speechwriter and policy adviser Michael J. Gerson was in attendance.

I'm inclined to agree with Getler that K&K should have disclosed their attendance at the meeting or, even better, not gone in the first place. But the original Media Matters suggestion that they were "consultants" does not appear to be supported by the evidence.

The new racial politics

A certain type of nasty race-baiting is becoming more and more pervasive at the national level. Up until a few years ago, it was more common to exploit anti-black or anti-minority resentment, and though some politicians still do so, we're seeing a trend toward both sides suggesting that the other is racist or pro-discrimination instead. For example, when Democrats opposed judges nominated by President Bush, Republicans have accused them, as the Washington Post put it, of being "anti-Catholic, anti-South and anti-Hispanic" for opposing judges with those backgrounds.

Here are two recent examples of this. First, Colbert King, writing in the Washington Post, suggested that Senator Barbara Boxer's harsh questioning of Condoleezza Rice during her confirmation hearing was motivated by racial stereotypes:

What's the motive behind this kind of assault? Is it a desire to demean or put her down? Is it a wish to marginalize Rice in the public eye, to suggest that by reason of her intelligence, ability or integrity, she is unqualified to hold her present post or to become secretary of state?

A senator who believes the Bush administration lied about the war, made a mess of postwar reconstruction and ruined relations with long-standing allies would be justified in holding Rice accountable, and in my view, in voting against her confirmation. Senate Foreign Relations Committee members Boxer and John Kerry did as much.

But slurring her as a hollow-headed marionette controlled by Bush? What's that all about? It calls to mind John Sylvester, a white radio talk show host in Madison, Wis., who recently went Boxer and Oliphant one better -- or worse. "Sly," as he calls himself, went on the air and caricatured Rice as a servile black, laboring slavishly for the Bush White House. He called her, of all things, an "Aunt Jemima."

The Boxer-Oliphant-Sylvester take on Condoleezza Rice stands in sharp contrast to the assessment offered by Dorothy Height, chair and president emerita of the National Council of Negro Women, who wrote in a letter to The Post this week: "Despite the challenges she will face, Ms. Rice's appointment is a time for women of color to smile."

Unfortunately, King's comments are part of a long pattern of similar accusations, as the liberal group Media Matters documents.

Now the GOP is trying to link Democrats to pro-slavery members of the party from 150 years ago:

Condoleezza Rice took the oath Friday as the first black woman to be secretary of State, then immediately reached back into history to invoke the legacy of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.

Her words were the latest example of President Bush and his top aides citing the Republican Party's often-forgotten 19th century antislavery roots — a strategy that GOP leaders believe will help them make inroads among black voters in the 21st century.

And if it reminds voters that the Democrats once embraced slavery, that's not such a bad byproduct, strategists say.

Bush, who keeps a bust of Lincoln prominently displayed in the Oval Office, is making Civil War references a staple of his speeches promoting democracy overseas and policy changes at home. And a glossy, GOP-produced "2005 Republican Freedom Calendar," spotlighting key moments in the party's civil rights history, has been distributed to party officials nationwide.

"We started our party with the express intent of protecting the American people from the Democrats' pro-slavery policies that expressly made people inferior to the state," Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach) wrote in a letter printed on the calendar.

The letter continued: "Today, the animating spirit of the Republican Party is exactly the same as it was then: free people, free minds, free markets, free expression, and unlimited individual opportunity."

Note how Cox implicitly equates Democratic support for slavery before the Civil War with their support for more government intervention in the economy today (both of which make "people inferior to the state"). This is ugly stuff.

DeSoto doesn't work?

The verdict from John Gravois in Slate is that the ideas of Hernando DeSoto, the massively hyped Peruvian economist, have not worked well anywhere they've been implemented. In some cases, they've even made things worse. I'm not a development economist and I haven't read DeSoto, but the idea of legally titling squatter land to provide collateral for loans to the poor always seemed too cute to me. It reminds me of Robert Putnam's social capital concept, which was popularized in Bowling Alone -- both are fascinating in their potential and have generated vast academic literatures, but their real world impact has turned out to be limited at best. The problem in DeSoto's case is that he appears to rely on implausible assumptions about capital markets. As Gravois shows, very few private banks are eager to loan to poor people based on slum property. What a disappointment.

PS Are there any more systematic treatments of DeSoto out there? Links welcome in comments.

Good news for media watchers

Very cool:

Google and Yahoo Are Extending Search Ability to TV Programs: Google and Yahoo are introducing services that will let users search through television programs based on words spoken on the air. The services will look for keywords in the closed captioning information that is encoded in many programs, mainly as an aid to deaf viewers.

Google's service, scheduled to be introduced today, does not actually permit people to watch the video on their computers. Instead, it presents them with short excerpts of program transcripts with text matching their search queries and a single image from the program. Google records TV programs for use in the service.

...A Google spokesman, Nate Tyler, said the service would include "most of the major networks," including ABC, PBS, Fox News and C-Span. Mr. Rosenberg said Google did not think it needed the permission of network and program owners to include them in the index but would remove any program or network if the owner requests it.

This could solve a number of problems at once: 1) Transcripts are often slow to become available. 2) They're often only available through Nexis, which most people can't access. 3) Google search is likely to be much smarter than Nexis.

Though it may become a Microsoft-like monstrosity someday, let's all give thanks for Google. They are revolutionizing information search.

How to destroy the American health care system, part 1

Grim news from the health care front:

Pointing to rising health costs and the oversized proportion of insurance claims attributed to smokers, some employers in California and around the country are refusing to hire applicants who smoke and, sometimes, firing employees who refuse to quit.

"Employers are realizing the majority of health costs are spent on a small minority of workers," says Bill Whitmer, chief executive of the Health Enhancement Research Organization, an employer and healthcare coalition in Birmingham, Ala.

Federal and state laws bar employers from turning down applicants or firing workers based on race, religion or gender. Some states have enacted laws offering similar protections for smokers. But experts say workers in nearly half the states, including California, have few legal options if employers decide to prohibit them from smoking outside the workplace.

Today, it's smoking, but tomorrow it could be obesity or 100 other conditions or behaviors -- and employers may not even wait to find strong supporting evidence before acting:

Though some studies have shown that smokers have higher absentee and lower productivity rates than nonsmokers, economists say the research is limited. It's possible, they say, that smokers don't dramatically increase health costs with chronic and expensive conditions like emphysema, heart disease and cancer until they're much older, when they may be employed elsewhere or retired.

This is a classic slippery slope problem. As the Times put it:

Critics are concerned that if more companies follow suit, it will lead to other employer intrusions on workers' lives. What is to stop companies from telling workers they can't ride motorcycles? Or eat junk food?

We're finally coming face-to-face with a deep tension in public policy. On the one hand, the dynamism of the US economy depends in part on the freedom of companies to hire and fire nearly at will, a drastic difference from regulations in place in Europe. But we depend on private employers to pick up the tab for health care for the bulk of our population. For a long time, they were generous in covering their workers (see, for instance, General Motors 1945-1970). And even as many employers have cut back or dropped coverage as costs have risen over the last twenty years, it has almost always been at the firm level. But refusing to hire or even firing workers for smoking could be a sign of a much more fundamental problem. If employers start discriminating based on behaviors (smoking, overeating) or pre-existing conditions (obesity, diabetes, previous incidents of cancer), it could very quickly break the risk-pooling function of health insurance; make it harder for non-healthy people to get jobs and coverage; and push more people with high medical costs into Medicaid. If only the healthiest people get covered, the private health insurance system in this country will essentially be destroyed.

What's the solution? I don't know. We should be careful before dumping more regulations onto companies, but it seems that the question of employer discrimination based on actual or anticipated health care costs needs a closer look. That's a starting point, a least. There are much bigger questions here about fixing the system at a more fundamental level, but I'll leave them for another day.

Bob Scheer, Senate candidate

In the course of doing some political science research, I discovered a disturbing fact: Robert Scheer, hack LA Times columnist, once ran for the US Senate in California. Way back in 1970, when he was waaaay out there on the left (far more so than now), he was the candidate for the Peace and Freedom Party. Shockingly enough, he didn't get too many votes. In fact, his vote total was so low that the Congressional Quarterly database I'm using doesn't even record it - he was one of the minor party candidates who collectively received 1.82% of the vote in the general election. Thankfully, the sanctity of the world's greatest deliberative body (ahem) was preserved.

The war over "private accounts"

Welcome to the spin politics of the 21st century. The debate over Social Security has already devolved into a battle over whether President Bush is advocating "private accounts" or not.

Mike Allen's story from Sunday's Washington Post sets the scene:

As the two parties brace for the coming debate over restructuring Social Security, polls and focus groups for both sides have shown that voters -- especially older ones, who vote in disproportionately heavy numbers -- distrust any change that has the word "private" attached to it.

The White House has a logical idea: Don't use the word. This is difficult because, after all, they would be "private" accounts, and Bush's plan would "partially privatize" Social Security.

So Bush and his supporters have started using "personal accounts" instead of "private accounts" to refer to his plan to let younger workers invest part of their payroll taxes in stocks and bonds. Republican officials have begun calling journalists to complain about references to "private accounts," even though Bush called them that three times in a speech last fall.

In fact, most conservatives talked about "privatization" and "partial privatization" until a 2002 NRCC memo (PDF) put out word that the term is politically damaging. Now they're on to stripping the term "private accounts" out of the language for the same reason even though it was a commonly accepted term used by both sides of the debate until only a few months ago. Suddenly, private account advocates like GOP pollster Frank Luntz are claiming that the term is pejorative and reporters shouldn't use it now that President Bush and other Republicans have stopped doing so (MP3 audio). Even the President tried to mau-mau the Washington Post during a recent interview:

The Post: Will you talk to Senate Democrats about your privatization plan?

THE PRESIDENT: You mean, the personal savings accounts?

The Post: Yes, exactly. Scott has been --

THE PRESIDENT: We don't want to be editorializing, at least in the questions.

The Post: You used partial privatization yourself last year, sir.

THE PRESIDENT: Yes?

The Post: Yes, three times in one sentence. We had to figure this out, because we're in an argument with the RNC [Republican National Committee] about how we should actually word this. [Post staff writer] Mike Allen, the industrious Mike Allen, found it.

THE PRESIDENT: Allen did what now?

The Post: You used partial privatization.

THE PRESIDENT: I did, personally?

The Post: Right.

THE PRESIDENT: When?

The Post: To describe it.

THE PRESIDENT: When, when was it?

The Post: Mike said it was right around the election.

THE PRESIDENT: Seriously?

The Post: It was right around the election. We'll send it over.

THE PRESIDENT: I'm surprised. Maybe I did. It's amazing what happens when you're tired. Anyway, your question was? I'm sorry for interrupting.

The campaign has been immediately successful in a matter of days, with the AP, Post and Times all starting to use other terminology like "individual accounts."

What's even worse is that others are already suggesting that the term is not pejorative, but somehow inaccurate:

"Semantics are very important," House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas (R-Calif.)said last week when a reporter asked about "private" accounts. "They're personal accounts, not private accounts. No one is advocating privatizing Social Security."

"Don't dismiss the use of a word," Thomas added. "The use of a word is critical in making law."

Thomas was playing this same game back on April 20, 2002, when he was interviewed by Bob Novak on CNN's "Evans, Novak, Hunt and Shields":

NOVAK: Chairman Bill Thomas, we have a commission appointed by President Bush which has proposed a very ingenious approach to Social Security, with private retirement accounts. The chairman of the Republican Campaign Committee, Tom Davis, doesn't want to see that on the floor. We had the majority leader Dick Armey here, says he doesn't want to see it on the floor. But you -- are you saying that it's possible that you might force the Republicans to vote on that this year?

THOMAS: Well, I wouldn't force the Republicans to vote on anything. First of all, no one's talking about privatizing or private accounts. We are talking about personal accounts. That is, you would still have all the securities that the current Social Security system has...

NOVAK: But they might vote on it?

THOMAS: ... but that they would be directed toward individuals.

It's one thing to not like the term, but for Thomas to say that the accounts in question are not "private accounts" is basically Orwellian.

As Republicans tie themselves up in knots coming up with approved euphemisms for the accounts, we get nonsense like this statement from House Speaker Denny Hastert, which was part of a National Republican Congressional Committee fundraising letter I received in the mail today (881K PDF - see page 2):

The President has endorsed establishing partial personal control of retirement accounts that would preserve Social Security for today's seniors while allowing younger workers to build wealth by investing part of their Social Security taxes in private investments. Do you support this bold proposal?

So we only get "partial personal control"? Aren't the accounts supposed to be "under the individual worker's ownership and control"? And the language appears to suggest that workers have money waiting for them in a Social Security account, which contradicts the conservative talking point that there are no such accounts. Obviously we know what Hastert means, but the NRCC direct mail firm appears to have been so paranoid about avoiding "privatization" and "private accounts" that the sentence turned into a disaster.

Unfortunately, this is where the whole debate over Social Security is going. The more that elites debate semantics rather than the substance of the issue (which almost no one understands), the less they and the public learn. And when PR professionals and politicians twist language, things get even worse. It's a lose-lose all around -- and a sad microcosm of the political debate as a whole.

Deficit-cutting plan allegedly on track

Rhetoric versus fiscal reality once again - from the Washington Post:

A senior administration official told reporters that Bush's budget -- to be announced Feb. 7 -- will show the government on track to cut the deficit in half from the White House's initial deficit projection for 2004.

But the CBO projections cast significant doubt on that claim. In total, the CBO projected that the government will amass an additional $855 billion in debt between 2006 and 2015, but Holtz-Eakin cautioned that the figure almost certainly understates the problem. The total assumes no additional money will be spent in Iraq or Afghanistan over the next decade. Perhaps more important, the CBO, by law, must assume Bush's first-term tax cuts will expire after 2010, sending the government's balance sheet from a $189 billion deficit that year to a $71 billion surplus in 2012.

The CBO forecast also excludes the cost of Bush's promised restructuring of Social Security, which could add an additional $1 trillion to $2 trillion over the next decade.

Even with those favorable omissions, the CBO projected that Bush will miss his goal of cutting the deficit in half by 2009 from last year's level. The 2009 deficit, excluding war and Social Security costs, is expected to drop to $207 billion, just over half of last year's record $412 billion level, the forecast said.

So with no spending on Iraq, Afghanistan or Social Security (as well as no fix of the alternative minimum tax, I assume), the deficit still isn't cut in half by 2009. But we're on track!

PS There's a great graph in the New York Times print version today illustrating how much different our long-term fiscal trajectory looks in the CBO numbers when you add in costs for Iraq, Afghanistan and making the tax cuts permanent. But it's not online for some reason. I'll try to scan it in later.

Update 1/26: It's online! (Kevin Drum has it up.) Here's the graphic:

By contrast, here's what the Wall Street Journal is feeding its readers (subscription required - via Paul Krugman on Josh Marshall's site):

As Krugman points out, the Journal fails to disclose that its chart is based on two implausible assumptions that CBO is required to make -- first, that Bush's tax cuts expire in 2010 and second, that nothing is done to reform the alternative minimum tax (though the editors acknowledge that the chart also excludes costs for Iraq and Afghanistan). If the tax cuts are made permanent and the AMT is fixed, things get a whole lot worse, as in the previous graph. Don't trust the Journal op-ed page!

Safire as ombudsman?

This is almost beyond belief (link via Atrios):

Times insiders say [former columnist William] Safire turned down Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr.'s offer to succeed Daniel Okrent as the newspaper’s ombudsman.

Whatever you think about Safire or the Times, this is insane. He is (was) an opinion writer with a highly checkered past as both a Nixon apparatchik and a journalist. That's not a confidence-inspiring watchdog who will improve the newspaper; it's a blatant attempt to appease conservative critics of the Times. Thank goodness Safire said no. But what does this mean about Okrent's successor? Is Sulzberger now courting Robert Novak? Brent Bozell?

What is Tom McMahon talking about?

Tom McMahon, the executive director of Howard Dean's Democracy for America group, sent out this bizarre email to supporters yesterday (53K PDF):

Listen to this one: "Dean had the oranges," said one of the other candidates for DNC Chair recently, "but he couldn't make orange juice."

It might take a second to figure out, but he was talking about you.

As the race for DNC Chair heats up, the attacks on Howard Dean have been relentless, even bizarre. But Governor Dean usually isn't the target of the attacks -- you are. And, unfortunately, those attacks have been more serious than the one about oranges.

They say that you don't really matter. That you have made no difference.

The candidate he was referring to is Donnie Fowler, who actually said this:

"The question about Dean is: While he will have a third of the vote easily, can he get to 50 percent?" said Donnie Fowler, one of Dean's opponents. Then Fowler referred to Dean's presidential campaign.

"Dean had the oranges," Fowler said, "but he couldn't make orange juice.

Contrary to McMahon's implication, Fowler was not demeaning Dean's supporters. He was using a metaphor to make the obvious -- and correct -- point that Dean couldn't win the Democratic nomination despite having the most grassroots support and the most money going into the Iowa caucus. Ripping the quote out of context is a cheap trick.

A response to Waight and Luskin

My post on The Note's criticism of Paul Krugman has generated a couple of responses that I should address -- one from Ken Waight of Lying in Ponds and one from obsessive Krugman critic Don Luskin.

First, let me deal with Waight. He's a good guy who was always extremely supportive of Spinsanity (including this post last week), and I admire his site. Here's his response to my post, which was clearly written in good faith:

I believe that [Nyhan] falls victim here to a very common misconception of Paul Krugman's work. Because Mr. Krugman is an award-winning economist, had shown some willingness to criticize Democrats in the 1990's, and because he doesn't generate the dripping vitriol of Ann Coulter or the lengthy record of deception of Robert Scheer, his writing is erroneously assumed to be free of "partisan hackery".

The only way to discover that his more recent writing has been precisely anti-Republican rather than anti-Bush, and that he has carefully failed to find fault with all Democrats rather than with liberals, is to carefully analyze the entire record of 450+ New York Times columns, and I'm the only person who's been curious enough, or perhaps weird enough, to do that. As I've described in excruciating detail, each of the alternative theories which have been offered for Mr. Krugman's one-sided punditry fail when tested against the data. He doesn't simply criticize those in power -- he wrote over 100 columns during the Clinton administration with almost no Democratic criticism, omitting any mention of the Marc Rich pardon, for example. He doesn't merely dislike the Bush administration -- his 30-1 ratio of negative to positive Republican references this year does not include more gentle treatment of moderates like John McCain (compare Thomas Oliphant or E.J. Dionne). He doesn't simply write about economic issues -- even columns about elections in France have been used to bash Republicans. His columns break down more perfectly along partisan lines than any other Democratic columnist I've examined, including Robert Scheer, Molly Ivins and Joe Conason -- no small feat. Paul Krugman's five years of NYT columns have been exceptionally partisan; it's just not a close call.

Ken and I don't actually disagree; we're talking about two different things. My post was a critique of the way that the Note dismissed Krugman's substantive concerns and ridiculed him for being predictable. The point was (1) that Krugman often has something substantively important to contribute in his columns and (2) that his writing is often "dismissed as partisan hackery even when it's not" because he is seen as predictable and not counter-intuitive. I never said he doesn't frequently criticize conservatives/Republicans; in fact, I specifically said Krugman is "consistently anti-Bush." Nor did I say his writing is never partisan hackery; sometimes it is.

Ken's point is that Krugman's writing is by definition partisan because he writes so many negative things about Republicans. But again, we're not disagreeing -- we just have different definitions of the word "partisan." According to Waight, a writer is partisan if he consistenly offers negative portrayals of one side of the political debate, and positive or non-existent references to the other side.

My definition is different. As I wrote, "there's nothing wrong in principle with being a forceful and consistent advocate for your views." I don't object in principle to polemicists who make good arguments and refrain from outlandish spin. Krugman often has something useful to contribute to the debate. I'm not concerned about how much he balances his writing with positive references to Republicans or negative references to Democrats. The key distinction for me is between, say, Krugman, and the other members of Waight's top 3, Ann Coulter and Robert Scheer, who are ridiculous partisan hacks. There's a crucial difference.

Now for Luskin's silly attack on me, which is titled "Why I hate pretentious leftist twerps." There are so many problems with it that it's hard to know where to begin, but let's start with this response to my statement that "elite journalism prizes being unpredictable above all else":

Apparently for Brendan Nyhan, elite journalism is anything he disagrees with. Because as Waight proves beyond the shadow of a scintilla of a doubt in a rigorous and amusing response to Nyhan, Paul Krugman is Pauly One-Note -- and with a vengeance. So to Nyhan, I suppose Waight must be a member of elite journalism, too.

This is a classic logical fallacy that Luskin just attributes to me. It's nonsensical.

Then he utterly misconstrues my criticism of Slate, which I ridiculed for its obsesssion with being counter-intuitive, by writing, "Don't be fooled by Nyhan's groveling brown-nosing of Slate (hoping for a gig, no doubt -- I mean, has Slate ever taken an unpredictable opinion on any issue, ever?)." This is followed by a series of ad hominems:

The elitist here is Nyhan himself -- someone who hasn't earned the slightest shred of eminence, and yet condescends to share how "sad" he is, how full of "pity" -- as if anyone other than his mother cares -- about the press's "level of understanding of Social Security."

Luskin subsequently makes up more claims about me with no supporting evidence:

Where does Nyhan get his understanding [about Social Security]? Why, from Paul Krugman, of course -- "one of the top economists alive." Maybe so -- and maybe Noam Chomsky is "one of the top semanticists alive," but I wouldn't trust Chomsky's whacko interpretation of the semantics of media manipulation any more than I'd trust Krugman's partisan interpretation of Social Security. Check out that "nice primer" that Nyhan probably hasn't even read. Sure, it looks on the surface like its published in a respectable peer-reviewed economics journal -- it uses the same kind of typeface and page layout as real journals -- but does Nyhan realize that The Economists' Voice is actually a political rag run by three ultra-liberal economists including Krugman crony Brad DeLong? Does Nyhan think it's appropriate for this "primer" from "one of the top economists alive" to feature such subjective non-economic statements as:

The right has always disliked Social Security; it has always been looking for some reason to dismantle it. Now, with a window of opportunity created by the public’s rally-around-the-flag response after 9/11, the Republican leadership is making a full-court press for privatization, using any arguments at hand.

In fact, I didn't get my understanding of Social Security from Paul Krugman; I read the article in question (PDF); I know who edits The Economist's Voice; and I'm aware that Krugman's article expresses his subjective views (what an insight!). And if Luskin actually bothered to do research before attacking real scholars, he might notice that TEV has now published articles by Hoover Institution fellow Edward Lazear; former Bush economic adviser Gregory Mankiw; and conservative judge/scholar Richard Posner in addition to Hoover fellow Michael Boskin, who Luskin previously ridiculed as playing "the Stepin Fetchit role of token conservative."

Next, Luskin dismisses my claim that "numerous reporters can't even understand the percentage of income that would be diverted into private accounts" using another logical fallacy, attacking the source, before simply asserting that I am wrong:

And follow Nyhan's link to support his point that "numerous reporters can't even understand the percentage of income that would be diverted into private accounts." You'll be taken to the pages of Media Matters, a George Soros-funded leftist attack site. And you'll see that all Media Matters has to say on the subject is that some reporters use the expressions "percent" and "percentage points" interchangeably -- but none of their examples even begins to suggest that this semantic error either arises from or causes any misunderstanding.

I stand behind my point - reporters who can't correctly explain how private accounts would work don't understand the math very well. And it's implausible that these frequent mistakes do not cause any misunderstanding among the public.

Finally, Luskin concludes with this winner: "It took me this long to write this response because, frankly, superficial wannabe twerps like Nyhan depress me and sometimes I'd just rather pretend they don't exist."

Sorry for spending so long on Luskin, but I can't let this kind of idiocy pass.

PS For those wondering about his grasp on facts and figures, don't miss this blunder on Social Security financing, which is all too typical.

Update 1/26: Waight has published a response to this post and Luskin's.

Why do conservatives pretend Republicans aren't tough?

There's a bizarre conceit in conservative commentary that Republicans are weak-kneed wimps who are continually taken advantage of by Democrats. Given how ruthless the Congressional GOP has been since Newt Gingrich first took control of the caucus, it's laughable, but it still persists. Here's the Wall Street Journal repeating the trope in an editorial arguing that Republicans should unilaterally repeal the judicial filibuster (this is the so-called "nuclear option"):

One of the weakest objections offered by some Republicans is that Democrats will do the same thing in some future Senate. Well, yes, but we doubt Republicans would ever have the nerve or unity to filibuster a Democratic nominee, and Democrats have shown in their willingness to filibuster that they don't need a GOP precedent to do whatever they want. They'll "go nuclear" if it suits Ted Kennedy's purposes, whether Republicans do it first or not.

Given that Democrats have filibustered around ten of Bush's nominees, can anyone doubt that Republicans would do the same thing to a Democratic president in the future if the judicial filibuster still exists? The idea that the GOP is too weak or disorganized to pull it off is just ridiculous. In fact, the Republican caucus obstructed far more of President Clinton's judicial nominees than the Democrats have of Bush's, but they did it through delays at the committee level rather than filibusters.

The Note asks a good question

From today's Note: What kind of reaction could they have been expecting to the State of the Union other than the one that they got? The White House has seemed strangely tone-deaf lately...

It's now tempting to treat the President's inaugural address like the 1986 season of "Dallas" that was Pam Ewing's dream — something that we all THOUGHT we experienced, but that — it turns out — didn't really happen.

To review: the very, very meticulous, media-savvy Bush White House had the President give a huge, historic speech in which there was unambiguously only one lead/headline possible — the President was adapting a new paradigmatic extension of the Bush Doctrine that called for fundamentally remaking America's relationships around the world based on the supreme value of supporting democratization.

For more than 24 hours, all the Gang of 500 talked about was how big a deal all this was, how unachievable, how weighted with implications for Saudi Arabia, Russia, etc, etc, etc.

Then the White House started background sessions (supplemented by a "surprise" weekend briefing room drop-by by 41) in which they said that this was "nothing new," "long-term," "broad goals," etc., etc., etc.

So: the President was for democracy on Jan. 19, on Jan. 20, and today. But he didn't really mean to suggest any new policy in his historic, ambitious inaugural address.

Dan Froomkin has more on the administration's efforts to walk the speech back in his White House Briefing column.

No on any Clinton or Bush in 2008

US News is carrying this gossip item in its latest issue:

Here's the long shot of the year: Congressional Democrats will OK a constitutional amendment allowing naturalized citizens like California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to run for president if Republicans help kill the 22nd Amendment barring third terms, thus clearing the way for another bid by Bill Clinton and, presumably, President Bush. Right now it's the talk among political strategists, but look for it to spread on Capitol Hill when Sen. Orrin Hatch reintroduces his plan to let naturalized citizens run for president after 20 years.

Now, there's no question that this is unlikely to happen. But it's still worth reiterating why it's such a stupid idea. The calcification of the American political system is a serious problem. Family-based ties have become more important in recent years both in Congress and at the presidential level. Bush or Clinton family dynasties are bad for the country; the system needs to be continually infused with new leaders and new ideas. The last thing we need is the same person holding the presidency for 12 or 16 years -- even if they can get the votes. We have a larger societal interest in a dynamic political system. Just say no.

(I'm still a huge supporter of amending the Constitution to let naturalized citizens for president, but the deal to make it happen needs to get done a different way, such as having the amendment not take effect for a certain number of years.)

Dowd's "SpongeBush" disaster

I try to ignore Maureen Dowd's inanities as much as possible, but her latest column is beyond absurd. "SpongeBush SquarePants"? It's like a Dowd parody done by a fourth grader. Can't she spend some of that reported $675,000 advance for Bushworld on a decent ghostwriter?

Update 2/14: If you're coming here from Google, make sure to check out our Spinsanity archive of criticism of Dowd. It's a winner.

Dems get smart in the 109?

Here's encouraging news that Congressional Democrats might stop being so stupid on defense issues:

It's a Senate tradition for the two political parties to advertise their priorities by revealing their top 10 pieces of legislation with a flourish at the beginning of a new Congress.

...Democrats intend to make an increase in the size of the armed forces their top bill, according to several officials who spoke on condition of anonymity. More prescription drug coverage under the new Medicare law is also on the list, as is education legislation.

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry campaigned for a 30,000-member increase in the size of the military last year. Senate Democrats have been thinking about raising that to 40,000.

Hallelujah! The active-duty military is severely overstretched and the Guard and Reserves are being ground down by repeated, prolonged deployments. This is one area where Kerry and Bill Kristol agree. Let's get it done.

The good and bad of Thomas on MTP

Rep. Bill "Dead Horse" Thomas, the California Republican who chairs the House Ways and Means Committee, appeared on "Meet the Press" with Tim Russert this morning to discuss Social Security.

There were a couple of good things about the appearance that are worth noting. First, Thomas joined the growing list of conservatives (including Chuck Hagel, Newt Gingrich and George Will) who admit that there is no "crisis" in Social Security, which has a 75-year shortfall that is far smaller than the cost of either making Bush's tax cuts permanent or the Medicare prescription drug bill:

MR. RUSSERT:  President Bush has said Social Security is in a crisis. Democrats say hold on, not so fast, it's not a crisis.  Is it?

REP. THOMAS:  Well, couple of weeks ago, the president had one of his forums in Washington, and if you'll look at what he said actually at that Washington forum, he used the term "problem" 27 times.  He used crisis zero.  I think problem really is what we're dealing with.

(Of course, Bush said that the Social Security "crisis is here" during his Dec. 20 press conference - see WashingtonPost.com's Dan Froomkin January 12 column for more on the recent switch toward the "problem" terminology. Let's hope Thomas can help solidify the shift to more appropriate language.)

The second good thing about the interview was that Thomas' rambling, often incoherent answers at least made clear to viewers how complicated the Social Security debate is. He didn't have the guts to stand behind all of his statements, but Thomas identified a number of the complicated tradeoffs that policymakers face, and suggested that politically painful steps like increasing revenue or decreasing benefits need to be part of the discussion. That's progress.

All that said, this question from Tim Russert was really annoying:

MR. RUSSERT:  Right now we have a cost-of-living increase, a COLA increase, that is tied more to wages than actual inflation.  It is inaccurate by everyone's estimation.  Should that be adjusted in order to be accurate and specifically related to inflation?

The way benefits are calculated using wages rather than prices is not simply a matter of "accuracy." This is Russert buying into the Washington establishment's obsession with curtailing entitlements. There are real value choices at stake in the debate over how to calculate benefits. Wage indexing costs more over time (since wages generally grow faster than prices), but it expresses the belief that seniors should benefit from the improved standard of living enjoyed by the rest of society. As Matt Yglesias wrote in The American Prospect Online:

Social Security benefits grow in real terms over time so that senior citizens have the opportunity to share in the increased prosperity that was made possible by their hard work in earlier years. Today, thanks to wage-indexing, the living members of the much-heralded Greatest Generation enjoy a standard of living befitting the early 21st century. If we'd implemented a price index from the beginning, they'd currently be stuck at the much lower standard of living enjoyed in their youth -- a time when many Americans lacked telephones and electricity.

There's a real policy question at stake here. To describe it as simply a matter of accuracy is ridiculous.

Update 2/3: Josh Marshall correctly pointed out that Russert is also conflating two issues - how initial benefits are calculated, and how they're adjusted for changes in the cost of living.

More bad Krugman criticism

Paul Krugman's columns are hardly perfect. But his critics cry wolf so often, and make such sloppy arguments, that they shouldn't be surprised when they're not taken seriously.

Most accusations of dishonesty against Krugman take the form of (1) starting from a different premise than him and then bashing him for (unsurprisingly) reaching a different conclusion or (2) citing evidence he doesn't deal with and criticizing him for not including it. As a general rule, neither is particularly convincing to people who don't share the critics' ideological preconceptions, but they just keep cranking this stuff out.

A case in point is a Tom Maguire post about Krugman's latest column that Glenn Reynolds approvingly linked to today. In it, Maguire criticizes this quote from Krugman:

[I]f we take into account realistic estimates of the fees that mutual funds will charge - remember, in Britain those fees reduce workers' nest eggs by 20 to 30 percent - privatization turns into a lose-lose proposition.

Krugman's statement is quite clear. He says he is discussing the fees that "mutual funds" will charge, and says that fees for similar funds in Britain "reduce workers' nest eggs by 20 to 30 percent." The assumption is clear: workers with private accounts will be able to choose from a relatively wide range of investment options, including actively managed mutual funds, some of which have high fees that reduce payouts quite dramatically over time. Moreover, the estimate from the UK appears to be accurate -- see Peter Orszag's 1999 analysis of the British private pension system, for instance, which found an average annual administration and management fee of 1.43% from 1989-1998. Over a 40 year career, that fee would reduce the account balance for a worker at retirement by 28%.

Maguire, however, proceeds from a different assumption than Krugman. This necessarily leads to a different conclusion, but he pretends Krugman is being dishonest instead. Using the 0.3% annual fee assumed by CBO in their July 2004 analysis of the President's Commission to Strengthen Social Security's Plan #2, he finds that the final account balance for private accounts would be reduced much less than 20-30% by administrative fees. This is, of course, true, which leads Maguire to celebratory snark:

But hold on!  Didn't Paul Krugman just ask for a "reasonable" estimate, and throw out 20% to 30% in Britain as a comparison?  Based on the CBO number and some mental math, we came to 7%, which was quickly confirmed by a more elaborate calculation.  Why, oh why is Prof. Krugman off by a factor of 300% to 400%?  How can it be that he is misrepresenting the intelligence and hyping his case?

You've got me.  Possible answers might include: (a) this was too complicated a calculation for a prospective Nobel Laureate; (b) this was an easy calculation but not a helpful result for polemical purposes; or (c) his beer was warm, and all the folks in Princeton speak English, so he thought he was in Britain.

Enjoy the weekend - pick (a), and put yourself up for a Nobel Prize.

However, the 0.3 percent cost figure assumes an extremely limited range of index funds are available. See table 1-1 of an earlier, more detailed CBO analysis of administrative costs for private accounts. Mutual funds do indeed reduce assets at retirement by 23 percent on average according to the CBO estimate in the table. The only retirement systems with administrative costs as low as CBO assumes are the current Social Security system and the Federal Thrift Savings Plan that Maguire cites as a model. And as CBO explains elsewhere in the same report, TSP allows workers to invest in only five index-type equity and bond funds, none of which are actively managed mutual funds of the type that Krugman was referring to.

Once again, different premise, different conclusion. Krugman should have been more clear that a TSP-type system could offer lower fees, and we can certainly debate his assumption that a wide range of investment options would be offered under private accounts (it seems inevitable to me). But those are different arguments altogether.

Update 1/24: Crazed socialist Irwin Seltzer uses a management fee estimate of one percent in the Weekly Standard, though he notes that former Bush economic adviser Larry Lindsey thinks this is much too high.

The Economist on "Meritocracy in America"

Don't miss this extremely valuable story in the Economist on inequality and social mobility in the US. The magazine -- which is no bastion of bleeding heart liberalism -- has issued an important warning:

A growing body of evidence suggests that the meritocratic ideal is in trouble in America. Income inequality is growing to levels not seen since the Gilded Age, around the 1880s. But social mobility is not increasing at anything like the same pace: would-be Horatio Algers are finding it no easier to climb from rags to riches, while the children of the privileged have a greater chance of staying at the top of the social heap. The United States risks calcifying into a European-style class-based society.

The evidence on social mobility is hardly encouraging to those who believe that every American has a solid chance to pull themselves up by their bootstraps:

[M]ore and more evidence from social scientists suggests that American society is much "stickier" than most Americans assume. Some researchers claim that social mobility is actually declining. A classic social survey in 1978 found that 23% of adult men who had been born in the bottom fifth of the population (as ranked by social and economic status) had made it into the top fifth. Earl Wysong of Indiana University and two colleagues recently decided to update the study. They compared the incomes of 2,749 father-and-son pairs from 1979 to 1998 and found that few sons had moved up the class ladder. Nearly 70% of the sons in 1998 had remained either at the same level or were doing worse than their fathers in 1979. The biggest increase in mobility had been at the top of society, with affluent sons moving upwards more often than their fathers had. They found that only 10% of the adult men born in the bottom quarter had made it to the top quarter.

The Economic Policy Institute also argues that social mobility has declined since the 1970s. In the 1990s 36% of those who started in the second-poorest 20% stayed put, compared with 28% in the 1970s and 32% in the 1980s. In the 1970s 12% of the population moved from the bottom fifth to either the fourth or the top fifth. In the 1980s and 1990s the figures shrank to below 11% for both decades. The figure for those who stayed in the top fifth increased slightly but steadily over the three decades, reinforcing the sense of diminished social mobility.

Not all social scientists accept the conclusion that mobility is declining. Gary Solon, of the University of Michigan, argues that there is no evidence of any change in social-mobility rates, down or up. But, at the least, most people agree that the dramatic increase in income inequality over the past two decades has not been accompanied by an equally dramatic increase in social mobility.

Take the study carried out by Thomas Hertz, an economist at American University in Washington, DC, who studied a representative sample of 6,273 American families (both black and white) over 32 years or two generations. He found that 42% of those born into the poorest fifth ended up where they started—at the bottom. Another 24% moved up slightly to the next-to-bottom group. Only 6% made it to the top fifth. Upward mobility was particularly low for black families. On the other hand, 37% of those born into the top fifth remained there, whereas barely 7% of those born into the top 20% ended up in the bottom fifth. A person born into the top fifth is over five times as likely to end up at the top as a person born into the bottom fifth.

Jonathan Fisher and David Johnson, two economists at the Bureau of Labour Statistics, looked at inequality and social mobility using measures of both income and consumption. They found that mobility "slightly decreased" in the 1990s. In 1984-90, 56% and 54% of households changed their rankings in terms of income and consumption respectively. In 1994-99, only 52% and 49% changed their rankings.

Two economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston analysed family incomes over three decades. They found that 40% of families remained stuck in the same income bracket in the 1990s, compared with 37% of families in the 1980s and 36% in the 1970s. Aaron Bernstein of Business Week points out that, even though the 1990s boom lifted pay rates for low-earners, it did not help them to get better jobs.

And, unfortunately, as the Economist points out, there are few signs of a reform movement, a substantial change from the 1880s, when growing inequality and class stratification sparked efforts to improve education, create an estate tax to prevent the concentration of wealth, bust monopolies, and so forth. It's time for that to change before the American meritocracy becomes an empty myth.

Update 1/25: David Brooks has more on this in the New York Times today. It's a good thing when a prominent conservative commentator takes concerns over inequality and social mobility seriously. Let's hope he's not the only one to pick up on this.

Great moments in pundit reasoning

Writing in the Weekly Standard, Fred Barnes suggests that the greater length of Bush's second inaugural address compared to his first is proof that the President's agenda has expanded:

It's amazing how much the president has expanded his agenda from his initial days in office. His 2001 inaugural address took 14 minutes. His speech last week was 21 minutes long. In 2001, Bush said, "America remains engaged in the world by history and by choice, shaping a balance of power that favors freedom." In 2005, he upped the ante dramatically. "America, in this young century, proclaims liberty throughout all the world, and to all the inhabitants thereof," he declared at the end of his second inaugural speech. "Renewed in our strength--tested, but not weary--we are ready for the greatest achievements in the history of freedom."

Of course, Abraham Lincoln gave the greatest second inaugural address in American history, and it was far shorter than his first even though Lincoln's agenda had expanded just a bit during the Civil War.

Great moments in morning television

This is what happens when you get up at 4 AM every day (courtesy of the Weekly Standard):

Couric: I'm Katie Couric, here with Lester Holt, Ann Curry, and Al Roker...

Curry: Also ahead, a controversial new book is out today that may be trying to rewrite American history. In it, sex researcher C.A. Tripp--it claims that President Clinton may have been gay.

Couric: No, no, no. Lincoln.

Roker: Lincoln.

Curry: Lincoln, President Lincoln. [Laughter.]

Roker: Wow!

Curry: Never have a woman come back from--I am so jet lagged.

Roker: Wow!

Curry: President Lincoln may have been gay.

Couric: Hillary's on the phone for you.

Curry: I know. So sorry, Mr. Clinton. I'm so sorry, Mr. President.

Laugher of the month

I'm a little late to this one, but I can't let it go by. Nicolle Devenish, the new White House communications director, offered this bon mot to the New York Times a couple of weeks ago:

Whether [improving relations between the administration and the media] can happen is an open question, since the relationship between any White House and the press corps is contentious. The current "don't ask us we won't tell you" press policy is in any case set by Bush, who distrusts the press and still blames it for his father's defeat.

Devenish, who was the communications director for Bush's re-election campaign, begs to differ about his attitude toward the press. "I don't think the president keeps the press at arm's length, and I think the president has a healthy respect for the press that covers him," she said.

Let's go to the tape (well, All the President's Spin). Here's White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card speaking to the New Yorker in a classic expression of the administration's view of the press:

They [the media] don't represent the public any more than other people do. In our democracy, the people who represent the public stood for election... I don't believe [the press has] a check-and-balance function."

And Bush has demonstrated his disdain for the media by holding very few press conferences. As of January 1, 2004, the grand total was 11, significantly fewer than his modern predecessors at the same point in their term, including Reagan (21), Clinton (38) and his father (71).

See the book for lots more on this subject. But one thing is clear -- with disingenuous statements like these, it looks like Devenish is ready to follow in Ari Fleischer's footsteps.

What is Terry McAuliffe talking about?

More Democratic nonsense on Social Security -- here's Terry McAuliffe in an email to supporters today:

We will fight President Bush and his Republican cronies as they try to:

...Undermine Social Security for today's seniors and future generations of retirees by privatizing the system.

Of course, no one, including President Bush or leading Republicans, is talking about reducing benefits for today's seniors. They are politically sacrosanct and will get their checks regardless of what happens with private accounts. But McAuliffe wants to scare you -- and them -- into believing otherwise.

Snow implies zero benefits in 2042

Treasury Secretary John Snow has published an op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal (subscription required) in which he uses the exact same strategy I flagged earlier -- implying that Social Security will stop paying out any benefits in 2042 when it exhausts the trust fund:

The current system will pay out more in benefits than it brings in revenue beginning in 2018 and shortfalls will grow larger with each year. By 2042, when workers in their 20s today begin to retire, the system will be bankrupt, meaning that it cannot fulfill the scheduled benefits.

Calling the system "bankrupt" and saying "it cannot fulfill the scheduled benefits" clearly implies that no benefits will be paid out. Snow never clarifies that Social Security will be able to continue paying out more than 70 percent of promised benefits. This is a nasty sleight-of-hand.

Reid's conspiracy theory

Yesterday, a Washington Post story reported that House Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas (R-CA) called President Bush's Social Security plan "a dead horse," spurring a great deal of controversy and media coverage.

But he wasn't done there. According to the Post, "Thomas said lawmakers should debate whether Social Security benefits should differ for men and women, because women live longer. 'We never have debated gender-adjusting Social Security,' he said. A House leadership official said that not even Republicans on Thomas's committee would vote for that idea."

Talk about a dead horse.

But Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, who has touted his new communications shop, was quick to demagogue Thomas' comment, saying in a statement, "And if a 50 percent benefit cut is not enough, now we learn Republicans are aiming to push even deeper cuts for America's women. Any suggestion that women do not deserve the same benefits as men is just plain wrong."

In Reid's world, a stray comment by an eccentric House Republican is proof of a GOP master plan to screw women. Come on.

The end of Spinsanity

We've decided to stop updating Spinsanity. You can read the announcement here.

If you're a new reader, hope you'll stay and check out the site. There are lots of posts below and more in the archives. The RSS feed is here. And of course, to be absolutely clear, the views expressed on this site are mine alone and do not reflect those of Spinsanity or anyone else -- for better or for worse. Enjoy!

Another PR innovation

WashingtonPost.com's Dan Froomkin notes that President Bush used a long opening statement to chew up a huge chunk of an interview with the Wall Street Journal. And I noticed Bush did the same thing to both the Washington Post and the Washington Times as well. To be sure, it's good that Bush is doing a lot of interviews lately, but the press needs to push back on Bush's filibusters (which he already uses during press conferences) rather than continually ceding ground. Don't let these rare opportunities to question the President go to waste.

The ever-changing deficit reduction plan

Here's the opening of Robert Samuelson's new Washington Post column:

Everyone is going to play numbers games to judge George W. Bush's next economic policies. At the top of the list will be Bush's pledge to cut the budget deficit in half by 2009. Although this promise seems simple, it isn't.

Let's see. Chad Kolton, a spokesman for the Office of Management and Budget, says the pledge was made a year ago, when the projected deficit for 2004 was $521 billion, or 4.5 percent of gross domestic product. Thus, the administration's targets for 2009 are $260 billion, or 2.2 percent of GDP. But wait; the actual deficit for 2004 was $413 billion (3.6 percent of GDP). Should Bush be aiming for half of that?

Shouldn't a major economic columnist be able to remember the basic history of the Bush administration's economic plans over the last two years? The first "plan" to cut the deficit in half was released in July 2003. At the time, the projected deficit for fiscal 2003 was $455 billion. Kolton is referring to a second version that was released in January 2004. Why let the administration move the goalposts without comment?

The zero benefits fraud

One of the key rhetorical moves in the current push for creating private accounts in Social Security is to suggest that the system will literally run out of money and stop paying benefits entirely in 2042. This is completely false.

First, a couple of examples. Here's President Bush speaking during a White House interview with the Orlando Sentinel:

"We're really addressing a younger generation of Americans, many of whom believe they will never see a dime in Social Security," Bush said. Without changes, "they're going to be right."

And here's Bush speaking with USA Today:

"Well, if we don't act now, the solution for Social Security, when it becomes — starts losing money in 2018, and out of money in 2040, will be much more severe. The sooner we work and solve the problem, the easier it is to solve the problem."

"And this — the Social Security system goes into the red in 2018. That means more money going out than coming in, and it gets worse and worse and worse. And so that if you're 20-years-old today, by the time you retire, the system will be broke."

CBS News even encouraged this perception in a December 15 report flagged by the liberal Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. Reporter John Roberts said, "In 2042, Social Security will become insolvent, and today's young workers risk losing their benefits." According to FAIR, "[a]n on-screen graphic explained that the workers-to-retirees ratio has been declining since the 1930s, with the final entry for the year 2042 reading: 'Insolvent = 0 benefits?'"

Thankfully, Rex Nutting of CBS Marketwatch destroyed this canard in a recent story:

Bush: "As a matter of fact, by the time today's workers who are in their mid-20s begin to retire, the system will be bankrupt. So if you're 20 years old, in your mid-20s, and you're beginning to work, I want you to think about a Social Security system that will be flat bust, bankrupt, unless the United States Congress has got the willingness to act now."

The facts: The Social Security system cannot go "bankrupt," for it has no creditors. By law, the trustees will continue to pay reduced benefits even if the trust fund is exhausted. Payroll taxes will continue to come in and benefits will continue to be paid. According to the trustees' intermediate economic forecast (neither doom nor boom), the trust fund will be able to pay about 73 percent of scheduled benefits in 2042 and about 68 percent of scheduled benefits in 2078. Future presidents and Congresses could also choose to fully fund scheduled retirement benefits from general tax revenue.

And Time also debunked Bush's bankruptcy rhetoric in a new story:

The President last week surrounded himself with citizens ranging from children to an 80-year-old and warned that the Social Security system will be "flat bust, bankrupt" by the time workers in their 20s retire. As early as 2018, Bush said, "you're either going to have to raise the taxes of people or reduce the benefits." At another appearance intended to promote federal standards for testing high school students, Bush went off script to warn a group of teenagers, "The system will be bankrupt by the year 2040."

That sounds pretty scary--except that it's not true. What will actually happen in 2018, according to the Social Security trustees who oversee the program, is that the money paid out in benefits will begin to exceed the amount collected in taxes. And since Social Security will run a surplus until then (and has been running one for some time), it has billions available that it can tap to fill the gap. Even under conservative estimates, the system as it stands will have enough money to pay all its promised benefits until 2042 and most of its obligations for decades after.

And credit where credit is due - as Bob Somerby points out, the one journalist to challenge the Bush administration on this was Chris Wallace of "Fox News Sunday" during an interview with Dan Bartlett, counselor to the President, on Sunday:

WALLACE (1/16/05): Let's turn if we can to another big issue, maybe the top of your legislative agenda on the domestic front: Social Security. The president keeps saying that there is a crisis, that if there is no change the system will go broke by 2042. Let's look.

BUSH (videotape): I want you to think about a Social Security system that will be flat bust, bankrupt, unless the United States Congress has got the willingness to act now.

WALLACE: As a simple fact, isn't that wrong?

BARTLETT: Absolutely not! And the bottom line is—the fact of the matter is that when you take the Social Security system as it is, this is a mathematical issue, not an ideological issue. In 1950, there were about 16 workers—

WALLACE: Let me just interrupt, because I know the fact that there were 14 workers for every person when it was first— The fact is that in 2042, if you did absolutely nothing to the system, it wouldn't be "broke." It wouldn't be "bankrupt." In fact, there would be a problem, but you would be able to still pay about three-quarters of everybody's guaranteed benefits.

BARTLETT: But what you're talking about—in 2018 we go into the red. In 2042, you start actually bankrupting the system, which you're having to get funds elsewhere. You're right, the payroll taxes at that moment could pay about 70 percent of the benefits.

WALLACE: But that isn't "bankrupt."

BARTLETT: Well, it's absolutely bankrupt, because you're absolutely in the red, and you're having to take dollars from elsewhere. And that problem only continues to get worse.

The question is: will the press start to call the president on this one consistently, or follow the example of the Orlando Sentinel and USA Today and let him keep getting away with it?

Postscript - Debunking of two more bogus claims:
-Talking point: Blacks get less from Social Security because they die sooner - see the Minneapolis Star-Tribune
-Talking point: The life expectancy of the elderly has changed dramatically since Social Security was created, worsening Social Security's financial problems -- see Nutting

Correction 1/20: Dan Bartlett is now counselor to the president, not communications director. My apologies.

The Armstrong Williams backstory

Most commentary I've seen on the Armstrong Williams controversy has been Crossfire-level at best - either it was an innocent mistake made by a PR firm, or a nefarious scheme to subvert democracy. But the best way to look at the story is as an example of how far the Bush administration will go in its use of the techniques of public relations, even if it means violating the norms of politics. This was the key point of All the President's Spin -- to understand the Bush administration, you have to understand its use of PR.

A classic example is the Karen Ryan incident, which we analyze in the conclusion of the book. It has all the same ingredients as Williams: a subcontracted PR agency does something that is considered normal in the world of business, but not in politics. When caught, the administration denies doing anything wrong, and says what was done is standard practice. (To review, Karen Ryan was the flack who posed as a reporter in a government-produced news segment designed to look like a real news story. It was then aired on a number of local newscasts without attribution. The Clinton administration previously engaged in this practice as well.)

As we wrote in ATPS, here's how Health and Human Services spokespeople replied to questions about the Ryan incident:

"The use of video news releases is a common, routine practice in government and the private sector," Kevin W. Keane said, adding, "Anyone who has questions about this practice needs to do some research on modern public information tools." Another HHS spokesman, Bill Pierce, later claimed, "There's no way this can be deceptive," saying, "If [local newscasts] run the whole package, that's their choice."

And here's Education Secretary Rod Paige's response to the Williams controversy as reported in Editor and Publisher - note in particular the third paragraph, which directly mirrors Keane and Pierce above:

In a statement e-mailed to E&P and other publications, Paige said: "I am sorry that there are perceptions and allegations of ethical lapses." But he defended the expenditure, saying it "went exclusively toward the production and airtime of advertisements in which I described the law and encouraged viewers and listeners to call the Department's toll-free information line. The funds covered those costs alone and nothing more. All of this has been reviewed and is legal."

But USA Today reported today that the Department of Education contract with Williams also called for him to "comment regularly on NCLB during the course of his broadcasts."

Paige also said in his statement: "Hiring outside experts to help communicate a complex issue is standard practice in all sectors of our society: local, state and the federal government; the private sector; and the non-profit sector. The work for which the Graham Williams Group was paid through Ketchum was part of a larger minority outreach effort by the Department because economically disadvantaged and minority students and families are most affected by the educational achievement gap that the law seeks to eradicate."

(Paige appears to contradict himself here, saying first that the money went only for advertisements and then later stating that Williams had been hired "to help communicate a complex issue.")

In the end, the message is the same: the Bush administration wants to win, and it will use all the tools of corporate PR to do so.

Update 1/19: I missed this when I was sick, but the Office of Drug Control Policy was recently caught issuing a Karen Ryan-style video news release.

A shameful mark on the 109th Congress

With everything else that is going on, it is easy to forget one of the worst developments from the 2004 election - the victory of Cynthia McKinney, conspiracy theorist extraordinaire.

Writing in the Weekly Standard, Matthew Continetti replays the incident that helped drive her from the House in 2002:

[I]n a March 25, 2002, interview on KPFA Pacifica radio, she suddenly fell off.

"We know there were numerous warnings of the events to come on September 11," McKinney said that day. "What did this administration know and when did it know it, about the events of September 11? Who else knew, and why did they not warn the innocent people of New York who were needlessly murdered? What do they have to hide?" McKinney thought she knew the answer. "What is undeniable," she explained, "is that corporations close to the administration have directly benefited from the increased defense spending arising from the aftermath of September 11th."

Continetti also details how McKinney has come to endorse the conspiracy theories of Michael Ruppert, "a former LAPD detective who is best known for his theories on CIA drug trafficking" but now is promoting the crackpot view that (in Continetti's words) "the Bush administration, Enron, Israeli intelligence, the Pakistani ISI, the Saudis, and Osama bin Laden were behind the terrorist attacks."

To paraphrase the annoying anti-Bush bumper sticker, it's time to re-defeat McKinney.

My doorstop

One of the few accomplishments of my 10-day December flu (besides watching almost everything on my Tivo) was finishing Bill Clinton's gargantuan My Life, which had been kicking around the house half-read for so long that I decided to put it out of its misery. Unfortunately, the misery was all mine. That book is virtually unreadable after he leaves Arkansas, which makes me wonder: how many people could possibly have finished it? They've sold a million copies or so; could 25,000 people have read it cover-to-cover? 50,000? I'd guess the rest of the books have been safely stowed away or displayed on Democratic bookshelves.

So I was amused to read when I came back from vacation that Knopf is splitting the book into two paperbacks to sell in grocery stores, airports, and other non-bookstore environments. The Times story on the decision has a hilariously droll description of the disjunction between the two parts of the book:

A two-volume edition will accommodate a feature of the book that was widely remarked upon by literary critics and others last year. Roughly the first half of the book, which deals with Mr. Clinton's childhood, college years and political life in Arkansas, was judged by many to be the far more interesting portion, while, to many, the presidential material sometimes read like an annotated desk diary.

Anyway, it'll be an interesting test of word of mouth versus impulse buying. Anyone who's heard about the book will buy the first half, but average people who don't care about Arkansas politics and want to read about his presidency may get slammed. (This could be a boon to in-flight magazines -- imagine taking that thing to read on a long plane trip.) Bill Clinton wasn't the worst president of the 20th century, but the second half of My Life might be the worst book of the 21st.

Mini-hiatus hopefully over

Just when it seemed like I was back in business, I suddenly disappeared again. Sorry about that. My final parting gift from Costa Rica was a bug that ended up putting me in the hospital for four days. But I'm back on the road to recovery and will again be revving this blog up in the days to come. Stay tuned.

Who will be the John Paul Vann of Iraq?

While I was in Costa Rica, I picked up Neil Sheehan's extraordinary book A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam, the best book I've read about the Vietnam War. The book centers on Vann, a lieutenant colonel who believed the war could be won, but became increasingly disillusioned with the way it was being conducted and went public with his concerns (he spent years attepting to salvage the war, eventually dying in a helicopter crash in 1972).

I despise facile, simplistic analogies between Vietnam and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but readers today can hardly miss the undeniable echoes of what's happening today in Iraq: a profound lack of accurate intelligence; areas of the country that are too dangerous to visit; an enemy that does not need to win, but fights at the time and place of its choosing, inflicts damage and then withdraws to wait out the US forces; civilian leaders who only see progress and ignore negative reports; intense pressure on reporters to deliver positive coverage; and a civilian population that turns against the US as the conduct of the war takes a mounting toll. The analogy is hardly complete; there are important differences between the two situations, and our effort in Iraq may still be salvaged. But the strategic logic of the war is undeniably against us, as it was in Vietnam, and the conflict is taking a massive toll on the military.

My question is this: Who will be the John Paul Vann of Iraq? Who will be the patriotic American soldier or diplomat who puts his or her career on the line to try to change the direction of the US effort in Iraq, or to help preserve the capacity of our overtaxed military? The emergence of such a figure is only a matter of time, it seems, given the internal discontent in the military and diplomatic corps.

Right now, you could point to Lt. Gen. James R. "Ron" Helmly, the head of the Army Reserve, who recently warned in an internal memo that the Reserves are "rapidly degenerating into a 'broken' force." The same clearly applies to the National Guard, also under intense stress from prolonged, repeated deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. But no high-ranking official has yet openly broken with our specific policies in Iraq as Vann did in Vietnam. Keep an eye out -- it could change the whole dynamic of the debate in a matter of weeks.

Update 1/8: According to an AP story, Newt Gingrich, the former House Speaker and a member of the influential Pentagon advisory group known as the Defense Policy Board, has a new book coming out that criticizes President Bush's policies in Iraq (in part). It's not exactly Vann, but interesting nonetheless.

Update 1/17: An astute reader points out that Vann's views of US strategy in Vietnam evolved during his time there. To be more clear, I'm talking above about the Vann of '61-'64 who criticized early US strategy, heavily influencing David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan and other American journalists covering the conflict (he later became unreasonably optimistic). As far as comments from readers about Vann not being well-known at the time, I think this indirect influence via the press mattered quite a bit.

Go Arnold go

Arnold Schwarzenegger has joined the redistricting reform movement. From the New York Times:

A little over a year after Arnold Schwarzenegger did an end run around politics as usual in the recall election that made him governor of California, he is embarking on a new campaign against the status quo here.

In his annual State of the State address on Wednesday night, the governor called on the Democratic-controlled Legislature to enact a fundamental overhaul that would include that most sacred of political cows, the way Congressional and legislative districts are drawn.

Mr. Schwarzenegger proposed turning over the drawing of the state's political map to a panel of retired judges, taking it out of the hands of lawmakers who for decades have used the redistricting process in a cozy bipartisan deal to choose their voters and cement their incumbency. He threatened to take the issue directly to the voters if the Legislature does not act on the plan in a special session he called for.

Mr. Schwarzenegger, a Republican, noted that of the 153 seats in the California Congressional delegation and Legislature that were on the ballot in November, not one changed party hands.

"What kind of a democracy is that?" he asked in his address.

"The current system is rigged to benefit the interests of those in office and not those who put them there," he said. "We must reform it."

Amen. I've been banging the drum for redistricting reform since I started this blog (see here and here). California's corrupt and insular political system needs a shakeup. And, even better, Kevin Drum says that a deal to make it happen might extend term limits substantially (yet another disastrous California policy that I'll get into some other time).

The problem, as Drum points out, is that Democrats would be politically foolish to turn over their ultimate stronghold to a redistricting commission while Tom DeLay is redistricting Texas Democrats out of their seats. It's a classic coordination problem. We're collectively better off if every state had competitive districts, but neither party has any incentive to unilaterally weaken its hold on seats it has locked up. Drum suggests that Democrats turn over California to a redistricting commission if Republicans do the same thing in Texas. That's implausible, but I wonder if it's constitutionally possible for states to coordinate their actions through some sort of redistricting convention. Think of international treaties that only go into effect if a certain number of countries ratify them. Why couldn't states do the same thing with redistricting reform?

Why I hate elite journalism

In a short jab at Paul Krugman last month, ABC's The Note encapsulates everything I hate about the DC insider journalist perspective:

Paul "Pauly One-Note" Krugman of the New York Times looks at international examples of privatizing retirement funds and says he isn't buying the Administration's arguments, saying that privatization cuts benefits and leaves more retirees in poverty. LINK

Not only is The Note obviously uninterested in actual policy issues like Social Security (the reason we have politics in the first place), but it dismisses Krugman with casual disdain as "Pauly One-Note". This attitude is why Slate tries so desperately to be counter-intuitive -- because elite journalism prizes being unpredictable above all else. Krugman is consistently anti-Bush; therefore his writing is dismissed as partisan hackery even when it's not. What's sad about this is the press has a pitiful level of understanding of Social Security, and they could learn something from Krugman, one of the top economists alive (who has written a nice primer on the issue for the online-only Economists' Voice [196K PDF]). Here's a case in point: numerous reporters can't even understand the percentage of income that would be diverted into private accounts. It's certainly true that Krugman sometimes bangs the drum too hard or fails to find fault with liberals, but there's nothing wrong in principle with being a forceful and consistent advocate for your views.

(For the best in-depth look at this issue, see Nick Confessore's 2001 profile of Krugman for Washington Monthly.)

Update 1/25: I've written a response to criticism of this post by Ken Waight and Donald Luskin.

Deficit nonsense

We compiled a long list of tax and budget whoppers from the Bush administration in All the President's Spin, but the progression of spin over the last month is shocking even to me. Up is down!

Economic Policy Institute, 12/8/04: The Bush budget released in February 2004 projects a deficit in fiscal 2009 of 1.6% of GDP (the much-touted reduction of more than half of the fiscal 2004 deficit), but reasonable assumptions from EPI show it will actually be 3.4% of GDP in fiscal 2009, more than twice as high as projected.

The Associated Press, 12/9/04: "White House budget director Joshua Bolten said the cost of implementing Bush's [Social Security] plans would not undercut Bush's goal of cutting the deficit in half over the next five years," even though a transition cost of $1-2 trillion over ten years would push the deficit higher than the projection of 3.4% of GDP above. Bolten added that "such costs 'may well' add to short-term annual deficits. 'I don't want to prejudge how they might be accounted for,' Bolten said.'If we maintain the policies the president has put out, I believe our path out over the next five to 10 years looks sufficiently strong that we could absorb transition financing' costs without swelling deficits that are too large compared to the economy, he said."

New York Times, 1/2/05:

To show that President Bush can fulfill his campaign promise to cut the deficit in half by 2009, White House officials are preparing a budget that will assume a significant jump in revenues and omit the cost of major initiatives like overhauling Social Security.

To make Mr. Bush's goal easier to reach, administration officials have decided to measure their progress against a $521 billion deficit they predicted last February rather than last year's actual shortfall of $413 billion.

By starting with the outdated projection, Mr. Bush can say he has already reduced the shortfall by about $100 billion and claim victory if the deficit falls to just $260 billion.

But White House budget planners are not stopping there. Administration officials are also invoking optimistic assumptions about rising tax revenue while excluding costs for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as trillions of dollars in costs that lie just outside Mr. Bush's five-year budget window.

The five-year plan, due in February, is likely to reaffirm previous predictions of a $217 billion surge in tax revenues in 2005, the biggest one-year jump on record, and almost $800 billion a year by 2009.

...As in past years, the budget will exclude costs for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which could reach $100 billion in 2005 and are likely to remain high for years to come. The budget is also expected to exclude Mr. Bush's goal to replace Social Security in part with a system of private savings accounts, even though administration officials concede that such a plan could require the government to borrow $2 trillion over the next decade or two.

Among the costs that are expected in the five years after 2009 are nearly $1 trillion to make Mr. Bush's tax cuts permanent, nearly $500 billion for the new Medicare prescription drug program and at least $400 billion to address widely acknowledged problems with the so-called alternative minimum tax.

...White House officials are making several budgeting decisions that make their tax revenues look higher and their spending look lower than many analysts think is realistic.

The first is to exclude a wide range of future costs for proposals, like those for military operations in Iraq, that White House officials say are impossible to predict.

Mr. Bush has consistently refused to include Iraq costs in his annual budget request, seeking money through a supplemental appropriations bill that lies outside the official budget. The White House asked for and received $87 billion for the last fiscal year, as well as another $25 billion to cover the first few months of the 2005 fiscal year. The administration is expecting to ask for as much as $80 billion more in the next few months, but it will not include any cost estimates in Mr. Bush's budget for the 2006 fiscal year.

...Administration officials are omitting a second big group of costs for goals Mr. Bush has identified but not formally proposed.

By far the biggest of these is his plan to privatize Social Security in part and let people divert some of their payroll taxes to private accounts.

Republican and Democratic analysts alike say the proposal would require the government to incur "transition costs" of $2 trillion or more over the next decade or two. That is because payroll tax revenue would immediately plunge, while benefits owed to retirees would decline only gradually.

Administration officials say any such transition costs should be treated separately from the regular budget, because they would eventually be recouped as benefits decline sharply over the next 75 years.

But the issue poses a ticklish problem for the administration, because it is already using surplus revenues in the Social Security trust fund to cover part of the annual budget deficit. The Social Security and Medicare trust funds took in about $146 billion more than they paid out in benefits in the last fiscal year, which reduced the government's overall deficit to $413 billion from about $560 billion.

One idea to prevent private savings accounts from causing an abrupt rise in annual deficits is to treat deposits into private savings accounts as a "transfer" within the government. Another idea is to include all the borrowing for transition costs in an account that would be separate from the government's operating budget.

White House officials say it is reasonable to treat the expected transition costs separately, because they will eventually be repaid as the government's obligation to pay benefits declines sharply after 30 or 40 years.

"These aren't costs, they are savings," said Scott McClellan, Mr. Bush's spokesman, at a recent news conference.

See Chapter 4 and Chapter 7 of ATPS for more. This is right out of the White House budget playbook - omit costs, move the goalposts on the deficit reduction plan (now on its second or third iteration), make shaky projections, etc.

Update 1/8: See this Campaign Desk destruction of a Reuters story on more budget mumbo jumbo.

The end of "Crossfire" and a defense of Tucker Carlson

In the wake of the cancellation of "Crossfire," there's been a lot of piling on. As you might guess, I will shed no tears at the demise of a show that helped pioneer the food-fight style of political debate. But the show was on in the afternoon for the last couple of years after being superseded by "Hannity & Colmes" and "The O'Reilly Factor." Its cancellation is no great victory for civil discourse on television. So let's not get carried away.

And, following Mickey Kaus and Andrew Sullivan, I will add a word in defense of Tucker Carlson, whose departure from CNN has been mixed up with news of the cancellation. As Sullivan points out, Carlson "is a rare, intellectually independent conservative" who has withstood the intense pressure in DC to follow the party line. He wrote a controversial piece for Talk about George W. Bush during the 2000 presidential primaries and came out against the war in Iraq, among other heresies. The format of "Crossfire" forced him into the standard left-right box, but if you watched the show carefully over the last couple of years you might have noticed that while Carlson was extremely critical of guests from the left (often rightly so), he didn't tout orthodox views of Bush, the war, etc. like almost every other conservative on television. And as Kaus points out, his PBS show is not exactly a shoutfest, though Carlson does challenge his guests.

Anyway, he's a very smart guy who was once regarded as one of the most promising and talented print journalists in Washington. I hope he finds a better format, and a boss that will treat him with more class than Jonathan Klein.

(Disclosure: I once had lunch with Carlson, and he wrote a nice blurb for All the President's Spin.)

The latest from the science spin wars

Chris Mooney, who's writing a book on the politics of science, flags the newest development in the spin war over global warming. The New York Times reported last month on disagreement at a UN conference on the issue:

 

Those sharply different perceptions led to a clash even over what language should be used in discussing disaster relief. Bush administration emissaries opposed the use of the phrase "climate change," employed since the days of the first Bush administration, in favor of "climate variability," a much more nebulous term.

In Chapter 5 of All the President's Spin, we discuss how the Bush administration consciously shifted from using the term "global warming" to "climate change". This is just one more step down the road toward language-twisting euphemisms that obscure more than they reveal. As Chris writes, the term "climate variability" is "not just nebulous: It implies natural variability, which is not what scientists think they're seeing out there in the real world."

More dissent-silencing agitprop

The ugly synergy between attacks on dissent and direct mail fundraising lives on. The Nyhan mailbag recently included a letter from Oliver North's Freedom Alliance suggesting that the media is encouraging the enemy in Iraq. The most blatant accusation comes in the the enclosed reply letter, which says "Dear Ollie... I want to help you counter the distortions of Peter Jennings, Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw and others in the liberal media who are undermining our war effort and giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Therefore, I am immediately signing my REFERENDUM ON THE MEDIA AND IRAQ and rushing it back to you today along with my most-generous, tax-deductible gift of..."

Tom DeLay was up to the same tricks a couple of weeks ago on the radio with North (surprise!), accusing critics of Donald Rumsfeld of aiding the enemy (via Tapped):

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, blasting congressional and media critics of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, said yesterday that the constant drumbeat of attacks on the Pentagon chief was undermining the war effort.

"What worries me is that we are aiding and abetting the enemy," DeLay told Lt. Col. Oliver North, who was filling in on Sean Hannity's ABC Radio network broadcast.

Without naming names, DeLay pointed the finger at "all these naysayers" who he said "constantly criticize and call everything a mistake."

The repeated attacks on Rumsfeld are only emboldening terrorists and their allies, the Texas conservative said.

(Scans of the North letter and reply form will be posted upon request.)