“Knuckleheaded Assumptions”: Bad Science Around “Job-Killing Regulations”
It is a seemingly immutable law of modern Republican rhetoric that the word “regulation” can never appear unadorned by the essential adjective: “job-killing.”
As in nominee-in-waiting Mitt Romney, after winning the Illinois primary: “Day by day, job-killing regulation by job-killing regulation, bureaucrat by bureaucrat, this president is crushing the dream.”
Or House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) denouncing “the president’s job-killing regulatory agenda” last month after the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed new limits on coal-fired power plants.
Or Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), who said during her presidential campaign that the EPA should be renamed the “Job-Killing Organization of America.”
Hating regulation is an old argument, but the phrase is a relatively new trope. A Nexis search of articles from U.S. newspapers and news services shows that the words “job-killing regulations” appeared just a handful of times in 2007 — but several hundred times in 2011.
This inflated rhetoric is often accompanied by bad science — or, perhaps more precisely, inherently inexact science badly used. Opponents of a particular regulation tout inflated projections of the regulatory body count, more often than not financed by the affected industry. Ditto, by the way, for those on the other side.
For example, when the EPA last year issued rules to limit mercury and other power-plant emissions, the industry-backed American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity estimated the regulations would trigger the loss of 1.44 million jobs.
At the same time, the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst concluded that the rules would instead create 1.46 million jobs through retrofitting old plants and switching to new sources of renewable energy.
The EPA itself came up with much more modest predictions — that the rules would create about 50,000 one-time jobs and another 9,000 additional jobs annually. All in the broader context of a rule that the agency estimated would deliver annual net benefits of between $166 billion and $407 billion from cleaner air, including avoiding as many as 51,000 premature deaths annually.
Lesson One: If you plug your cherry-picked assumptions into your preferred model, it’s easy to obtain the desired result. Lesson Two: Jobs are only part of the larger picture.
A new report from the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law attempts to bring some economic rationality to the regulatory discourse — however quixotic that might be in the current political environment, not to mention in a presidential election year.
The report is titled “The Regulatory Red Herring: The Role of Job Impact Analyses in Environmental Policy Debates.” Yet somewhat surprisingly, Michael Livermore, the institute’s executive director, does not oppose factoring job impact into the cost-benefit analysis. Rather, he argues for adopting a more sophisticated approach than the prevalent knuckleheaded assumption — my words, not his — that increased regulation inevitably results in fewer jobs.
If an employer’s costs increase as the result of a regulation, Livermore notes, that is another way of saying that the employer has to hire workers to, say, install new technology while other employers hire workers to produce the new equipment.
In a healthy economy, the cost of layoffs should be transitory, as workers quickly find new jobs. In an economy like the current one, the impact of such layoffs may be more persistent — but any new jobs created may be more significant since, in a soft labor market, otherwise unemployed workers may be hired.
Can these cross-cutting impacts be accurately measured in a dynamic economy? Perhaps more important for the current discourse, is it possible to have the jobs and regulation discussion without ignoring the inherent limitations of economic modeling?
“The jobs impact analysis is important and we should do it, but the way it’s discussed now is completely wrong,” Livermore told me.
First, he said, “we talk about the jobs impact on the one hand and the other impacts (such as health and safety improvements) on the other hand, and they’re treated as apples and oranges.” Instead, he said, “we need to integrate the jobs impact into the broader costbenefit analysis.”
Second, Livermore said, is a failure among those doing the analyzing to disclose the assumptions and limitations of their models — and the willingness of politicians (and the media, for that matter) to treat the resulting figures as gospel rather than guesstimate.
“The real problem is the way they’re used in the political back and forth,” Livermore said. “They’re used as sledgehammers to beat up the other side.”
No surprise there. But a useful reminder at a time when the phrase job-killing has become mind-numbing.
By: Ruth Marcus, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 24, 2012
The “Amnesia Candidate”: Mitt Romney Lull’s The American People And The Media On The Economy
Just how stupid does Mitt Romney think we are? If you’ve been following his campaign from the beginning, that’s a question you have probably asked many times.
But the question was raised with particular force last week, when Mr. Romney tried to make a closed drywall factory in Ohio a symbol of the Obama administration’s economic failure. It was a symbol, all right — but not in the way he intended.
First of all, many reporters quickly noted a point that Mr. Romney somehow failed to mention: George W. Bush, not Barack Obama, was president when the factory in question was closed. Does the Romney campaign expect Americans to blame President Obama for his predecessor’s policy failure?
Yes, it does. Mr. Romney constantly talks about job losses under Mr. Obama. Yet all of the net job loss took place in the first few months of 2009, that is, before any of the new administration’s policies had time to take effect. So the Ohio speech was a perfect illustration of the way the Romney campaign is banking on amnesia, on the hope that voters don’t remember that Mr. Obama inherited an economy that was already in free fall.
How does the campaign deal with people who point out the awkward reality that all of the “Obama” job losses took place before any Obama policies had taken effect? The fallback argument — which was rolled out when reporters asked about the factory closure — is that even though Mr. Obama inherited a deeply troubled economy, he should have fixed it by now. That factory is still closed, said a Romney adviser, because of the failure of Obama policies “to really get this economy going again.”
Actually, that factory would probably still be closed even if the economy had done better — drywall is mainly used in new houses, and while the economy may be coming back, the Bush-era housing bubble isn’t.
But Mr. Romney’s poor choice of a factory for his photo-op aside, I guess accusing Mr. Obama of not doing enough to promote recovery is a better argument than blaming him for the effects of Bush policies. However, it’s not much better, since Mr. Romney is essentially advocating a return to those very same Bush policies. And he’s hoping that you don’t remember how badly those policies worked.
For the Bush era didn’t just end in catastrophe; it started off badly, too. Yes, Mr. Obama’s jobs record has been disappointing — but it has been unambiguously better than Mr. Bush’s over the comparable period of his administration.
This is especially true if you focus on private-sector jobs. Overall employment in the Obama years has been held back by mass layoffs of schoolteachers and other state and local government employees. But private-sector employment has recovered almost all the ground lost in the administration’s early months. That compares favorably with the Bush era: as of March 2004, private employment was still 2.4 million below its level when Mr. Bush took office.
Oh, and where have those mass layoffs of schoolteachers been taking place? Largely in states controlled by the G.O.P.: 70 percent of public job losses have been either in Texas or in states where Republicans recently took control.
Which brings me to another aspect of the amnesia campaign: Mr. Romney wants you to attribute all of the shortfalls in economic policy since 2009 (and some that happened in 2008) to the man in the White House, and forget both the role of Republican-controlled state governments and the fact that Mr. Obama has faced scorched-earth political opposition since his first day in office. Basically, the G.O.P. has blocked the administration’s efforts to the maximum extent possible, then turned around and blamed the administration for not doing enough.
So am I saying that Mr. Obama did everything he could, and that everything would have been fine if he hadn’t faced political opposition? By no means. Even given the political constraints, the administration did less than it could and should have in 2009, especially on housing. Furthermore, Mr. Obama was an active participant in Washington’s destructive “pivot” away from jobs to a focus on deficit reduction.
And the administration has suffered repeatedly from complacency — taking a few months of good news as an excuse to rest on its laurels rather than hammering home the need for more action. It did that in 2010, it did it in 2011, and to a certain extent it has been doing the same thing this year too. So there is a valid critique one can make of the administration’s handling of the economy.
But that’s not the critique Mr. Romney is making. Instead, he’s basically attacking Mr. Obama for not acting as if George Bush had been given a third term. Are the American people — and perhaps more to the point, the news media — forgetful enough for that attack to work? I guess we’ll find out.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, April 22, 2012
“Beat The Press”: How Mitt Romney Avoids Most National Interviews
It wouldn’t be fair to say that Mitt Romney is hiding from the national media, exactly. Why, on Thursday morning he went on Fox & Friends, fielding such tough questions about his challenge to President Obama as: “You’re beating him with independents. How are you going to outdo him in that department?”
And Romney did sit down—with his wife, Ann, which seems to have been the point—for a chat this week with Diane Sawyer, which focused on Ann Romney’s role, a handful of issues, and why he once transported the family dog on the car roof.
But as he makes the pivot to general-election nominee, Romney remains a remote figure to most of those who are covering him. And some Republican campaign veterans say that makes political sense.
“Of course he should be wary of the media,” says Ari Fleischer, the former Bush White House spokesman. “The media are increasingly adversarial. It’s always in the candidate’s interest to talk to the media on his terms and his timing. Why would he want to turn his agenda over to the press?”
Steve Schmidt, who managed John McCain’s 2008 campaign, also sees a risk of being knocked off message.
“If you field 75 questions a day, your chances of giving a bad answer are relatively high,” Schmidt told me. “If you give 74 good answers and slip up on one, guess which one will be on cable news and driven to the comedy shows?”
Instead, says Schmidt, he expects Romney to visit more venues like Jay Leno’s show, perhaps accepting an invitation from Saturday Night Live, “where he has an opportunity to connect with audiences or demographics where he’s weak.”
The Romney campaign says the candidate has been quite available in ways that don’t register on the national radar. Since March 30, spokeswoman Andrea Saul points out, Romney has done 21 interviews with local television stations. He has also done six cable interviews, five of which were with Fox News—two of them with Sean Hannity—and one with conservative CNBC commentator Larry Kudlow. Romney has also done 10 radio interviews with such conservative hosts as Hannity and Mike Huckabee.
During the primaries, when Newt Gingrich was snarling at John King and other debate moderators and Rick Santorum was accusing a New York Times reporter of peddling “bullshit,” Romney generally refrained from press bashing. He did grumble in a speech to newspaper editors that “in 2008, the coverage was about what I said in my speech. These days, it’s about what brand of jeans I am wearing and what I ate for lunch.”
But Romney took aim squarely at the Fourth Estate this week in an interview with Breitbart TV, founded by the late conservative provocateur Andrew Breitbart. After complaining about a “vast left-wing conspiracy” aligned against him, Romney said that “many in the media are inclined to do the president’s bidding.” That undoubtedly plays well with the Republican base, but sniping at the press may do little to attract the independent voters he needs in November.
Romney may well be frustrated by the rolling coverage of his wealth, his car elevator, his stumbles, his religion and, yes, that incident with the Irish setter. But he pays a price for his strained relations with the journalists who follow him around the country.
Most view him as stiff and awkward, and as a Beltway outsider, the former Massachusetts governor has given them few glimpses of the person behind the political mask. A subtle resentment factor may develop when reporters feel they’re being stiffed month after month.
“Keeping the press corps at arm’s length doesn’t pay off in the end,” says Doug Hattaway, a spokesman for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign. “They drive the storylines that define the conversation in social media and entertainment. You need to be in that game as well. You can’t ignore it.”
“Fundamentally, we weren’t going to be held to two sets of rules,” Schmidt says. “Obama gave very limited access to the press pool.”
The era of journalists sizing up candidates through background conversations is a casualty of today’s Twitter age, says Schmidt: “On the bus, the average age of reporters was 24, each with a handheld camera or cellphone looking to file the most politically damaging thing they could file that day.”
Fleischer says it is often a matter of not having a stray comment obscure your message. “If President Bush gave a speech and made news, we wanted that to stand on its own,” he says.
What’s more, “the press still has a hangover from the love affair in 2008, even though they’re not as in love with him as they used to be. It’s much easier to be Barack Obama than Mitt Romney when it comes to press coverage.”
But the inescapable fact is that Romney has a propensity for damaging slips of the tongue. The morning after the Florida primary, he stepped on his victory by telling CNN’s Soledad O’Brien that “I’m not concerned about the very poor.”
Such gaffes have undoubtedly made his team more cautious about putting Romney in television studios.
“They’re in a tough position because more exposure doesn’t necessarily help Romney—the more you see him, the less you like him,” Hattaway says.
Romney, who has not appeared on any Sunday program other than Fox News Sunday, clearly recognizes the need to broaden his approach. In that Breitbart TV interview, he said that Fox is watched by “the true believers.”
But he has had testy moments even on Rupert Murdoch’s network, such as when he grew irritated with anchor Bret Baier for pressing him last fall on his changing positions on several issues.
By November Romney will have to demonstrate that he can hit major-league pitching in less friendly confines than Sean Hannity’s set. How often he does that will depend on what he views as the risks and benefits of facing the vast left-wing conspiracy.
The upside of forging relationships with beat reporters, says Hattaway, is that “when they know the candidate as a person, they’re likely to be a little less cynical or snarky.”
Of course, Romney doesn’t have much of a cheering section even on the right. National Review editor Rich Lowry, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, columnist George Will, Red State blogger Erick Erickson and others have all displayed varying degrees of skepticism or hostility toward him. And the Romney camp has made little effort to court the conservative cognoscenti, with top adviser Stuart Stevens insisting they have no interest in running “a green-room campaign.”
Every presidential candidate, including Barack Obama in 2008, has wrestled with how much to deal with the traveling press corps. This was a particular dilemma for McCain, since the Arizona senator spent endless hours during his cash-strapped 2000 run for president chatting up reporters on his Straight Talk Express. That approach abruptly ended once he clinched the 2008 nomination.
“The Minority Defeats The Majority”, Again: The Media Needs To Tell Readers The Truth About GOP Filibustering
The death-by-filibuster of the Buffett Rule in the Senate yesterday revealed, among other things, that the news media still has a ways to go in learning how to report on the era of the 60-vote Senate.
Most Americans, not surprisingly, do not realize that majorities can no longer get their way in the Senate. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that most key votes in the Senate were based on simple majority voting. Only since 1993 has constant filibustering been common, and only in 2009 did Republicans create a situation in which virtually everything requires a supermajority. Reporting in these circumstances is a bit tricky, but if you are going to tell the full story of a bill killed by filibuster, you need to report not just the outcome — a bill lost — but that majority sentiment was thwarted by a minority.
So, how did the major papers do yesterday? Neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post had the word “filibuster” in their on-line front page headlines or teasers. The Post story does get the “F” word into her second paragraph, which is good. The Times story merely refers to the 60 votes the Democrats “needed” to pass the bill, without mentioning that the 60 votes were “needed” to break a GOP filibuster until way down in the eighth paragraph. Politico called it a “filibuster” in the second graf. But none of the three stories said explicitly that a minority of Senators defeated a majority.
CNN’s web story was particularly awful, reporting simply that “the Democrats fell nine votes short.” There was no mention of a filibuster, or that the “nine votes short” added up a 51 vote majority — so no one reading the story could deduce that a majority of the Senate favored the policy. The Los Angeles Times, in a broader story, also claimed that the Buffett Rule was blocked by “Republican-led opposition,” whatever that means. Again, no mention at all of a filibuster, or which way the majority voted.
None of this is good enough. Whether one supports the filibuster, opposes it, or (as I do) hopes for a middle course, it’s simply not informative enough to just say that something was “blocked” without explaining that it was blocked by a minority of Senators who deployed a filibuster.
The decision of the Republican minority to create the 60 vote Senate — and the willingness of the Democratic majority to go along with it — remains perhaps the most important single structural fact of Congressional procedure. It has been at least as important as any other factor in shaping Obama’s legislative agenda. And news organizations still aren’t telling readers and viewers the full truth about what’s happening.
By: Jonathan Bernstein, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, April 17, 2012
GOP “Manufactured Controversies”: Editors And Reporters, There’s No Excuse For Taking This Stuff At Face Value.
Greg already flagged a brutally bad New York Times story about the Hilary Rosen flap earlier this morning, pointing out that the Times totally butchered Rosen’s (non-) involvement in Barack Obama’s campaign. He’s right — but that only scrapes the surface of what a bad job this story does with the phony controversy that broke out when Rosen said something stupid on CNN on Wednesday.
Let’s start with the headline: “Collision Over Roles of Women Sets Off Combative Debate Along the Trail.” Huh? That never happened. There was no “collision over roles of women,” and especially not “along the trail,” which is to say, in the context of the campaign. What actually happened is that one TV talking head, to be sure someone there to represent the Democrats, said something foolish which was immediately pounced on by Mitt Romney’s campaign…and by the Obama campaign as well. No collision. No debate.
The article took the entire “controversy” (as framed by Republicans) at face value:
The campaign for the White House spilled into the politics of motherhood on Thursday as a combative back-and-forth involving a Democratic strategist and Mitt Romney’s wife quickly revived a deeper, decades-old cultural debate about the roles of women in and out of the workplace.
Again: that never happened, at least not within the campaign’s context. Did some people use Rosen’s words as an excuse to wallow in a “decades-old cultural debate”? Sure. But no one who speaks for the Obama campaign or the Democratic Party in any meaningful capacity took the “objectionable” side of that debate. No officials from the Obama campaign or the Democratic Party said anything about stay-at-home moms that attracted criticism. And when one lone Democrat did say something, the Obama campaign and the larger Democratic Party network condemned it and said exactly the same things that the Romney campaign said. There was no campaign disagreement. Anyone who only read the Times story would have come away believing that there was an actual presidential campaign dispute over stay-at-home moms.
Here’s the bottom line. We’re going to have these manufactured controversies throughout the campaign. Both sides know how to take an awkward remark and turn it into a huge flap, regardless of whether there’s anything real behind it. Hey, editors and reporters: don’t fall for it! No one is really offended; there’s no there there, and you shouldn’t be afraid to say so. It’s fine to report what the campaigns are up to, but whether it’s Etch-a-Sketch or this one or the next dozen that are going to follow, there’s absolutely no excuse for taking this stuff at face value.
By: Jonathan Bernstein, The Washington Post Plum Line, April 13, 2012
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