“It Only Takes One Simpleton”: Our Laws Are Made By Idiots
Back in 2009, Michele Bachmann told an interviewer that she was refusing to answer any questions on the census form other than how many people lived in her household. It seems this passionate advocate of the Constitution as sacred text found Article 1, Section 2 incompatible with her small-government ideology. But that’s the problem with seeing things through such narrow blinkers: when you are convinced that every question in public debate has but a single answer (“Government is bad!”), then your answers to some ordinary questions can become absurd.
So it was when the House of Representatives, a body now seemingly devoted to seeking out new ways to make itself look stupid when it isn’t pushing the country toward economic calamity, recently voted to undermine the American Community Survey, a supplement to the decennial census. The ACS gathers information on many different measures of Americans’ lives, providing valuable data that demographers, historians, and all manner of social scientists use to understand our nation and its people. Because the ACS is far larger than ordinary public opinion polls, it provides highly reliable data that are also used by government itself and by private industry. So how could something like that become politicized? How could any congressional Republican, no matter how stupid, possibly come to see it as some kind of liberal plot or wasteful boondoggle? Catherine Rampell of The New York Times explains (forgive the long excerpt; it’s a good explanation):
This survey of American households has been around in some form since 1850, either as a longer version of or a richer supplement to the basic decennial census. It tells Americans how poor we are, how rich we are, who is suffering, who is thriving, where people work, what kind of training people need to get jobs, what languages people speak, who uses food stamps, who has access to health care, and so on.
It is, more or less, the country’s primary check for determining how well the government is doing — and in fact what the government will be doing. The survey’s findings help determine how over $400 billion in government funds is distributed each year.
But last week, the Republican-led House voted to eliminate the survey altogether, on the grounds that the government should not be butting its nose into Americans’ homes. “This is a program that intrudes on people’s lives, just like the Environmental Protection Agency or the bank regulators,” said Daniel Webster, a first-term Republican congressman from Florida who sponsored the relevant legislation.
“We’re spending $70 per person to fill this out. That’s just not cost effective,” he continued, “especially since in the end this is not a scientific survey. It’s a random survey.”
In fact, the randomness of the survey is precisely what makes the survey scientific, statistical experts say.
Each year the Census Bureau polls a representative, randomized sample of about three million American households about demographics, habits, languages spoken, occupation, housing and various other categories. The resulting numbers are released without identifying individuals, and offer current demographic portraits of even the country’s tiniest communities.
It is the largest (and only) data set of its kind and is used across the federal government in formulas that determine how much funding states and communities get for things like education and public health.
I don’t for a minute think that John Boehner has been gunning for the ACS for years, or that the entire Republican caucus feels passionately about it one way or the other. But in the House today, all it takes is one simpleton of a first-term Tea Party congressman to bring this up, and the rest of them say, “Gee, I don’t want to vote for government! Because government is bad!” So they go along. All but ten House Republicans voted for Webster’s amendment, and Rand Paul has a companion bill in the Senate. What a fine display of leadership and responsible governing.
And about Webster saying the ACS “is not a scientific survey. It’s a random survey,” a bit of explanation is in order. When you say a survey is “random,” it means the respondents are selected randomly, meaning everyone in the population has an equal chance of being in the sample. That’s what makes a sample unbiased, as opposed to, say, interviewing only men or only people in California, which would be non-random surveys. Surveys have to be random, except under some very carefully defined circumstances, in order to allow you to extrapolate to a larger population. But what obviously happened is that Webster saw something about the sample being “random,” and said, “What?!? It’s just some random survey? What the hell? Let’s kill this thing!” And here’s where it’s really disheartening. From that point forward–as he wrote his bill, convinced his colleagues, and saw it passed through the House–nobody clued him in to the first thing about how surveys work in general or how this survey works in particular. Nor, obviously, did he try to find out for himself. Because who cares?
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, May 20, 2012
“In The Interest Of The Rich”: Romney’s Radical Theory Of Fairness
So, to recap Mitt Romney’s new stump speech, he thinks Americans should vote on whether they’re financially better off than they were in 2008 — which is to say, they should blame President Obama for the effects of the Great Recession. He accuses Obama of attempting to run the campaign instead on “diversions, distractions, and distortions.”
What does Romney mean by that? He means that Obama wants Americans to base their vote on who has their interest at heart. Obama argues, and I would agree, that Romney’s agenda advances the narrow interests of the richest Americans at the expense of the broader interest. And of course, this is a fundamental ideological divide between the two candidates and their parties. Democrats want to maintain (and slightly expand) the government’s role in redistributing income from the best-off Americans to the most vulnerable. Republicans consider that sort of redistribution essentially illegitimate. What Romney calls a distraction is actually the most important issue of the election.
That isn’t to say he ignores it completely. Romney’s speech does contain one somewhat oblique passage in which he attempts to turn the fairness issue back against Obama. His argument is revealing. Here’s how Romney puts it:
I have a very different vision for America, and of our future. It is an America driven by freedom, where free people, pursuing happiness in their own unique ways, create free enterprises that employ more and more Americans. …
This America is fundamentally fair. We will stop the unfairness of urban children being denied access to the good schools of their choice; we will stop the unfairness of politicians giving taxpayer money to their friends’ businesses; we will stop the unfairness of requiring union workers to contribute to politicians not of their choosing; we will stop the unfairness of government workers getting better pay and benefits than the taxpayers they serve; and we will stop the unfairness of one generation passing larger and larger debts on to the next.
In the America I see, character and choices matter. And education, hard work, and living within our means are valued and rewarded. And poverty will be defeated, not with a government check, but with respect and achievement that is taught by parents, learned in school, and practiced in the workplace.
Romney has to couch the implications of his argument carefully, but the underlying logic is perfectly clear. He believes that fairness is defined by market outcomes. If Romney earns a thousand times as much as a nurse in Topeka, it is solely because his character, education, or hard work entitle him to that. To the extent that unfairness exists, it is solely the doing of government: clean energy, laws permitting union dues, overpaid government employees, and so on. Aside from unfairness imposed by government, poverty is attributable to the bad choices or deficient character or upbringing of poor people.
Now I doubt that Romney actually believes the full implications of this, even though many Republicans certainly do. But it is striking that Romney’s formulation makes no allowance for the role of government in alleviating unfairness created by the marketplace. To be sure, he is just making a campaign speech, but every speech by Obama invariably has passages lauding the marketplace and wealth. Here’s Obama yesterday:
In America, we admire success. We aspire to it. I want everybody here to do great, be rich, go out and start a business. That’s wonderful.
Now, campaign rhetoric is campaign rhetoric, but in this case it reflects an underlying reality. Obama wants the government to do a bit more to reduce inequality, but he is not proposing to change the United States’ place as the most unequal advanced economy on Earth. His opponent has adopted the position that any interference with the natural level of inequality created by the market is illegitimate. He may not want to take that philosophy to its absolute limit, but he is running on a program that would go very far toward implementing it.
The desire by Democrats to center the campaign on this basic philosophical choice is not a distraction, nor is it an attack on wealth. It’s an attempt to highlight what the election is actually about.
By: Jonathan Chait, The Daily Beast, April 25, 2012
“Committed To Decline And Despair”: It’s Time For The GOP To Grow Up
The United States needs two responsible governing parties if it’s ever going to address its most pressing problems.
I’ve grown so used to dismissing Tom Friedman’s work for The New York Times that when he writes something genuinely good, it comes as a surprise. To wit, in his column for the Sunday paper, he aruges that our political system has devolved into a “vetocracy”—a system where “no one can aggregate enough power to make any important decisions at all.”
The culprits, according to Friedman, are polarization, broken institutional norms—in particular, filibuster abuse—the massive proliferation of special interests, and the growing importance of money in politics. The ultimate outcome of this, says Friedman, is governmental paralysis:
America’s collection of minority special-interest groups is now bigger, more mobilized and richer than ever, while all the mechanisms to enforce the will of the majority are weaker than ever. The effect of this is either legislative paralysis or suboptimal, Rube Goldberg-esque, patched-together-compromises, often made in response to crises with no due diligence. That is our vetocracy.
This dovetails with a problem that Friedman only alludes to:
[I]f you believe the fantasy that America’s economic success derives from having had a government that stayed out of the way, then gridlock and vetocracy are just fine with you. But if you have a proper understanding of American history — so you know that government played a vital role in generating growth by maintaining the rule of law, promulgating regulations that incentivize risk-taking and prevent recklessness, educating the work force, building infrastructure and funding scientific research — then a vetocracy becomes a very dangerous thing.
If there’s anything that defines the current political moment, it’s the fact that—of the two major parties—one has completely abandoned the American consensus that Friedman describes. In the mythology of the Republican Party, government has never played a part in the country’s growth or prosperity—the “free market” alone is responsible for the nation’s current prosperity. Not only does this run counter to the historical record—to say nothing of observable reality—but it has resulted in a world where one party refuses to accept a role for government in anything.
As Friedman (obliquely) points out, this is a recipe for disaster. The institutions of the United States aren’t built for one-party rule, and we can’t make progress on pressing issues—climate change, health care, aging infrastructure—without a mutual understanding between the two parties. Republicans don’t have to abandon their preference for small government or their skepticism for federal programs, but effective action requires the GOP to back away from its opposition to the public sector, and reconsider the role of government in solving the nation’s problems.
Between Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, the Republican Party is committed to a radical attack on the size and role of government. The Romney economic plan, which draws its ideas from Paul Ryan’s budget, would eliminate most non-defense discretionary spending, and funnel the savings to tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. Vital government functions like environmental regulation, scientific research, and poverty reduction would be sacrificed on the altar of small government. This isn’t a sustainable state of affairs. A world where government completely withdraws from the lives of ordinary Americans is one where we all but commit to a path of decline and disrepair.
If there’s anything that this country needs right now, it’s a responsible and functional Republican Party. I won’t hold my breath.
BY: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, April23, 2012
“At Odds With Reality”: Three Conservative Myths About Government
The Path to Prosperity blueprint of House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan—the foundation for the budget that the House passed last week—reflects conservative politicians’ war on government. As my Center on Budget and Policy Priorities colleagues conclude about a Congressional Budget Office, or CBO, analysis of the Ryan plan:
The CBO report, prepared at Chairman Ryan’s request, shows that Ryan’s budget path would shrink federal expenditures for everything other than Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and interest payments to just 3¾ percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) by 2050. Since, as CBO notes, ‘spending for defense alone has not been lower than 3 percent of GDP in any year [since World War II]’ and Ryan seeks a high level of defense spending…the rest of government would largely have to disappear.
The conservatives’ war is sustained by a series of myths.
Myth No. 1: Spending Is Out of Control, and Only Draconian Cuts Will Rein It In
As my colleagues at the center have shown, however, noninterest spending outside Social Security and Medicare spiked in the Great Recession but is scheduled to fall substantially as a share of GDP as the economy recovers (see chart).
To be sure, government spending will rise as a share of gross domestic product as the population continues to age, healthcare costs throughout the economy continue to rise, and more Americans become eligible for Social Security and Medicare. But, my Center on Budget and Policy Priorities colleagues have written:
When Americans hear talk of the government exploding in size and reach, they don’t usually think this means that more people will receive Social Security and Medicare because the population is growing older or that Medicare will cost more because of factors like the aging of the baby boomers and advances in medical technology that improve health and prolong life but at significant cost. Outside of those demographic and health cost factors, the portrait of a rapidly growing federal behemoth is simply at odds with reality, since costs are shrinking to levels well below their historical averages.
Myth No. 2: The Country Faces a Looming Debt Crisis Due to the Debt Incurred In the Past Few Years
That myth fueled irresponsible brinksmanship over legislation to raise the nation’s debt limit last year, and it stands in the way of meaningful deficit-reduction.
While the policies that Presidents Bush and Obama and Congress enacted to combat the financial crisis and Great Recession helped drive up deficits after 2007, those policies were temporary and will have little effect on deficits and debt going forward. The weak economy and the legacy other policies enacted under President Bush (especially his tax cuts) play a far larger role. Indeed, the Congressional Budget Office calculates that under current law (which calls for the Bush-era tax cuts to expire at the end of this year), deficits would fall over the coming decade as the economy improves, and debt would fall to 61.3 percent of GDP in 2022.
Yes, the gap between spending and revenues will rise again as a share of GDP in later decades if we don’t take prudent action to rein in future deficits. Policymakers and analysts who are not ideologically committed to radically shrinking government recognize that this will require a balanced mix of revenue and spending measures. But such a balanced policy runs up against myriad tax myths, including the following:
Myth No. 3: Americans’ Tax Burden Is High and Rising
That’s certainly the impression the Tax Foundation wants to convey in its latest “Tax Freedom Day” report released earlier this week: “Americans will work 107 days into the year, from January 1 to April 17, to earn enough money to pay this year’s combined 29.2% federal, state, and local tax bill. ”
But notice, the report does not refer to “every” American or the “typical” American. That’s because, as this Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report demonstrates, four out of five U.S. households likely pay a much lower average tax rate than the one highlighted in the Tax Foundation report. Moreover, average federal income rates are at historic lows for typical taxpayers. When total taxes, including federal and state and local taxes, are taken into account, the United States has one of the lowest average tax rates among all industrialized countries.
So, here’s the question:
Are those who advance these myths interested in fixing the deficit and debt problem, as most Americans would hope, or are they conducting a bait-and-switch in pursuit of antitax advocate Grover Norquist’s quest to “reduce [government] to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub?”
By: Chad Stone, Chief Economist at The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Published in U. S. News and World Report, April 5, 2012
“Don’t Pick Out Hymns For Its Burial”: Still Plenty To Watch For In Health Care Debate
I have a few quick thoughts on this week’s Supreme Court hearings and what it will mean for our coverage of health reform.
Most people in the courtroom (or people who, like me, listened to audio, read transcripts, wrote and edited a ton of copy and couldn’t avoid Jeff Toobin) ended up with the gut feeling that health reform is in deep trouble – that the court is likely to toss the individual mandate, some of the insurance provisions, and maybe a whole lot more. Maybe all of it.
But of course, we don’t really know what the court will do. Tough questions in public certainly let us know that all nine justices are not exactly the law’s biggest boosters. But what they will do, as they mull and debate behind closed doors, is not a sure thing. We can guess, but we don’t know. And we won’t know for about three months. (There’s a chance that it will be sooner – but traditionally big rulings come out at the end of the term. And this is a big, big ruling).
Remember the “Conventional Wisdom” was wrong before – wrong from the beginning. The CW didn’t think Obama was going to push for comprehensive health reform. The CW didn’t think he’d be able to enact health reform – particularly not after Scott Brown’s election. The conventional wisdom didn’t think there would be a fight about the mandate. Or that the mandate would end up in the Supreme Court. Or that it would be in deep, deep, deep trouble once it got there.
So what do we do for the next three months?
First of all, we are going to get spun – and the negativity about the oral arguments is going to help the anti-health law camp of spinners. (The “hey it’s hunky-dory, it’s all fine” advocacy world rings a little hollow at the moment – although they may turn out in June to be right.) Keep an eye out for that “the law is dead so let’s get real” drumbeat because if things are said often enough, in a media or political context, they can start becoming the new conventional wisdom and affecting how we report and write.
We might get pushed by editors to be more forceful about predicting the demise of the law (or the mandate) than we are comfortable with. Push back – you can certainly say there are real questions about the law’s survival. You can’t pick out hymns for its burial.
Watch your state. Are officials slowing down implementation? Not submitting grant applications for exchange planning when they were before, or not putting out bids for exchange IT teams, etc.? Are the implementers slowing down – and are the non-implementers freezing? How much catching up will they have to do if the statute is upheld – and they have to meet some exchange certification deadlines by Jan. 1, 2013.
Is the court situation affecting state politics – local, congressional, presidential. How?
Is anyone talking about state initiatives to fill in if the parts of the federal plan are punctured? For instance, if the federal mandate fails, there’s nothing to stop a state from passing its own mandate; the federal constitutional questions don’t apply. I suspect few states will do this – but I can think of a handful that might. (If this does start to bubble up in your state, please email me your coverage.)
What are the hospitals’ and insurers’ and physician groups’ contingency plans? Are delivery system reforms and innovations on hold – or is the assumption that they can either proceed without the federal law, or that the relevant sections of the law will survive
And does the public know what it wished for? It wanted health reform when it didn’t have it. Then it decided it didn’t like health reform when it got it. Do Americans really want to go back to March 22, 2010 (the day before President Obama signed it)? And do they realize they can’t; that the health system has changed? Do they understand that people who are getting benefits under the first phases of the law’s implementation could lose them? And that costs will rise, the numbers of uninsured (now somewhere around 50 million) will rise, and Congress – so polarized that it has trouble doing much more than renaming post offices these days – is not going to come swooping in with a pain-free bipartisan fix-the-problems-with-no-cost-or-dislocation make-everyone-happy solution.
By: Joanne Kenen, Association of Health Care Journalists, March 29, 2012
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