Obama's "math" for Ryan's budget: the assumptions are the point

Ezra Klein has done yeoman's work defending the factual basis of Obama's attack on the Ryan budget, thoroughly pwning David Brooks' denunciation of that attack. (When it comes to arguing on a factual basis, Klein vs. Brooks has got to be the most lopsided serial mismatch in media today).  Klein demonstrates that the assumptions Obama made in sketching out the effects of the cuts were reasonable. I just want to gild the lily by highlighting that Obama went the extra mile and spelled out those assumptions, and why he was making them.

Klein lays out the challenge of evaluating the effects of the Ryan budget this way:

Attention, David Brooks: "Romney grits" are not the issue

Nice diversion, David.

David Brooks would have us believe with regard to Romney that "the wealth issue is a sideshow," because Romney is not a "spoiled, cossetted character," but rather a fanatic hard worker shaped by his family's persecution and pioneering grit. True enough, and point taken.

But the trust fund stereotype is a straw man.  Romney's wealth is an issue -- and a potent one at this point in American history -- not because his privileged (and demanding) upbringing spoiled him, but because, as a member of the 1% (or the point-one percent), he proposes to further cut taxes on the wealthy and shred the social safety net.  As Ezra Klein recently pointed out, Romney's budget proposals are far to the right of candidate George W. Bush's. As Jonathan Cohn adds, his cap on Federal spending at 18% of GDP puts him to the right of Paul Ryan, whose budget ends Medicare as we know it and radically reduces Social Security.

Romney's wealth is also at issue because the way he earned it encapsulates both the strength and the weakness of American capitalism in the Reagan and post-Reagan era. Bain may well have revitalized many companies that could not have survived without restructuring via the kind of strategic management the company pioneered and fostered. Bain also loaded down its purchases with debt and effectively looted some of them: the leveraged structure effectively siphoned wealth from employees to investors.  Bain, in short,  contributed both to growth and growing inequality.

Tell us more, David Brooks: why do Americans mistrust government?

David Brooks makes a fair point today: Americans' lack of trust in government undermines liberalism.  But then he can't forbear to give his bias enough play to blame Democrats almost equally for this sad state of affairs.   His diagnosis skips or elides key drivers of this lack of trust.

First, it's cultural. Americans have been railing against the federal government since before it existed. The ratification debate was rife with fear that a tyranny was being established, a fear shared by many members of the Constitutional Convention.  Six-year Senate terms, lifetime judgeships, a vice president with feet in two branches of government, direct taxing power -- all were excoriated as instruments of tyranny. A few decades later, states' rights became the battle cry and vehicle for those who so resented any impingement -- or potential impingement -- on their "right" to hold slaves that they established their own weak confederacy custom-designed to leave them to their pleasures of personal dominion.

Attn, David Brooks: Where the "culture of exposure" came from

Once again today, Times readers are treated to a bit of sanitized cultural history by David Brooks.  Tracing the progress of American media from a "culture of reticence" about the private lives and off-the-record grousing of public figures to a "culture of exposure," Brooks recounts:

Then, after Vietnam, an ethos of exposure swept the culture. The assumption among many journalists was that the establishment may seem upstanding, but there is a secret corruption deep down. It became the task of journalism to expose the underbelly of public life, to hunt for impurity, assuming that the dark hidden lives of public officials were more important than the official performances.

Gee, I wonder where that assumption of "secret corruption deep down" came from?  Rick Perlstein's Nixonland has answers on almost every page, documenting ten years of relentless government lying about Vietnam as well as the pervasive criminality and war criminality of the Nixon White House.

Take, for example, the response of Nixon's henchman to columnist Jack Anderson's exposure of a memo documenting ITT's swap of a $400,000 campaign donation for a promise that the Nixon Justice Department would lay off on antitrust enforcement:

There goes David Brooks again....

When David Brooks cites a stat for didactic purposes, hit the factcheck button.

Today, Brooks undertakes to explain why Bad Accidents Happen to Good Workers, citing several allegedly ineluctable laws of human nature alleged to explain why we're biased toward minimizing risk. Among them:

Third, people have a tendency to place elaborate faith in backup systems and safety devices. More pedestrians die in crosswalks than when jay-walking. That’s because they have a false sense of security in crosswalks and are less likely to look both ways.

As an inveterate New York diagonal jaywalker, I took some satisfaction in this apparent factoid. But then I began to think. Aren't there a lot more people in the crosswalks than outside them? Ten times as many, maybe? Okay, in New York, five times as many?

Google and Wikipedia steer casual inquirers on this question to Tom Vanderbilt's In Defense of Jaywalking, published in Slate last November.  There, lo, I found half my NY conjecture vindicated -- minus any figures as to what percentage of street crossings in the city are outside the lines:

In New York City the Post, quoting numbers from the DoT, said 50 jaywalkers were killed annually; this is a high number to be sure, but just one-fourth the total pedestrian death toll.

I would venture to speculate, though, that well more than one-fourth of NYC street crossings are in crosswalks. Vanderbilt's analysis provides further statistical complexity:

In which I (essentially) win my "quick bet against Brooks"

Three weeks ago, I put up a post based on my inference that David Brooks had misrepresented a statistic cited from Stephen J. Rose's not-yet-published Rebound: Why America Will Emerge Stronger from the Financial Crisis.  Brooks reported that according to Rose, "Over the last 10 years, 60 percent of Americans made more than $100,000 in at least one of those years, and 40 percent had incomes that high for at least three."  My inference, that Rose was referring to household rather than individual income and that "Americans" should be "American households," was based on past Rose writings and a near-identical error that George Will made in citing Rose's income data claims. 

Andrew Sullivan linked to my post. Brooks complained that I was wrong, that Rebound did refer to "adults" as opposed to "households." The Dish posted a direct quote from Rebound: ""Another way to look at incomes over many years is to see how often people experienced high and low incomes. Indeed, fully 60 percent of adults had at least one year in which their incomes were at least $100,000" (p. 119).  I posted a retraction and apology -- conceding that whatever the truth behind the numbers, I was wrong to jump to the conclusion that Brooks had misquoted Rose (though I did originally acknowledge the "highly unlikely" possibility that Rose's numbers or terminology may have changed from 2007 to 2010).

Today my copy of Rebound finally arrived (Update: my full review here). I am happy to report that while the book does indeed (of course) contain the sentence above, Rose's definition of terms earlier in the chapter makes it clear "their incomes" signifies the household income of each "adult" -- adjusted, moreover, for age and household size (see Update 2 and Stephen Rose comment below).

David Brooks "Dull as Expected" on health care reform

The headline to David Brooks' column proclaims cheerfully that the health care summit was "not as dull as expected!"  But David Brooks here is dim as expected -- as dim as ever on health care.

His signature charge, here and elsewhere, is that the Democrats are not serious about cost control because supporters of the excise tax on expensive policies have allowed that tax to be weakened:

Fifth, you got to see at least one area of bipartisan agreement. Neither side was willing to be specific about how to cut costs and raise revenue. The Republicans continued to demagogue efforts to restrain Medicare spending. The Democrats (and the Republicans) conveniently neglected to mention the fact that they had just gutted the long-term revenue source for their entire package, the excise tax on high-cost insurance plans. That tax was diluted and postponed until 2018. There is no way that members of a Congress eight years from now are going to accede to a $1 trillion tax increase to pay for a measure that the 2010 Congress wasn’t brave enough to pay for itself.

First, it is just plain slander to assert that the Democrats are unwilling to be specific about how to raise revenue.  The House bill has no excise tax, but it is deficit neutral -- it raises money from other taxes, such as a surtax on high earners, while the Obama plan published in advance of the summit adds a new Medicare surtax on capital gains for high earners.  Second, as Atul Gawande has documented in exhaustive detail and as a group of top health care economists led by Dr. Alan Garber has affirmed, the bill deploys just about every means of cost control that health care experts deem to have potential  -- coordinated care teams, incentives for results and penalties for not meeting standards on measures such as hospital readmissions, a MedPAC commission with real authority -- and yes, the excise tax, albeit delayed.

Third, it is always suspect to speak of "courage" when dealing with collective bodies.   The excise tax has not been weakened because of a lack of "courage." Indeed, Obama has gone to the mat for it as he never did for the public option -- as Ezra Klein predicted he would long ago. Unions and their closest allies in the House have had the 'courage' to risk the entire bill to weaken this tax.  Cost control hawks have had the "courage" not to let it go.  Any further "courage" on their part would doom the bill to failure.

Matt Miller's self-cancelling 'don't worry about the deficit now' argument

Matt Miller's argument that worries about the Federal deficit are overblown is self-cancelling.

The argument has two prongs. First, per his experience in the Clinton administration in 1993, he suggests that current deficit forecasts are often overblown.  A period of strong growth can change the picture fast. Second, Miller asserts that we more or less know what to do but lack the political courage.

The second point at least is incontrovertible.  Miller sketches out two key planks of likely deficit reduction: breaking Obama's pledge not to raise taxes on people making less than $250k per year and "trimming social security benefits for better-off retirees."  In other words, raise taxes and cut benefits.

But his argument that we should not worry now about the looming need to do just that makes no sense.  Blame Obama if you will for his no-new-taxes-under-$250k pledge. (I do: I have always thought that David Brooks' one valid fundamental criticism of Obama during the campaign was that this pledge would box him in.) Or defend it as a valid attempt to avoid the recurrent pattern of Republicans destroying our finances with tax cuts and Democrats getting killed at the polls for raising them -- as they did in 1994 -- by getting as much juice as possible out of taxing the wealthy.

On jumping off our Constitutional shadow

In an extended meditation over whether the United States retains the ability to cope with current problems and thrive anew, James Fallows recently concluded that the country's actual problems are manageable -- but wondered whether our political machinery maintains the ability to cope with them. The dysfunctions that struck Fallows as most intractable derive from a Constitution that has bequeathed us an increasingly unrepresentative Senate, compounded by Senate rules that evolved over time into a formula for gridlock.

A recent lament by Jonathan Chait highlights the extent to which Senate dysfunction is a product of norms of behavior as much as rules on paper (or parchment):

Many of the changes in American politics over the past three decades have involved the two parties slowly doing away with social norms that preventing them from using every tool at their disposal. The Senate minority could filibuster every single bill the majority proposed, but you just didn’t do that, until you did. You could use a House-Senate conference to introduce completely new provisions into a bill, but you just didn’t do that, until you did. (The topic became common in the Bush administration.) The possibility was always there to use endless amendments to filibuster a reconciliation bill. But nobody thought to do that until Republicans floated the tactic this week.

The “hold” is a now similar tool to what the filibuster was forty years ago. It’s a sparingly-used weapon meant to signal an unusually intense preference. A Congressional scholar reports that putting a blanket hold on all the president’s nominees has never been done before. But there’s no rule that says you can’t. It’s just not done,  until it is...

...history shows that you can’t count on social norms to prevent competing parties from trying to maximize their advantage. The only way to change this kind of behavior is to change the rules.

Few would dispute that when norms deteriorate, rules must be changed to shape new norms (hence the consensus that the country's financial regulation must be overhauled).  But there's a chicken-and-egg element in the interaction between rules and norms.

We like to think of the U.S. as a nation of laws. But laws only work to the extent that they breed norms and taboos that predispose those bound by them to obey the spirit as well as the letter.  The Bush years highlighted the extent to which the U.S. had been until that point a nation of customs -- norms to which those in government broadly bound themselves.  To paraphrase Chait: the President couldn't assert that his capacity as commander-in-chief in wartime gave him the authority to break all laws and treaties at will, until he did.  The CIA could not limit the definition of torture to actions causing major organ failure until it did (or until the Justice Department did).  The Justice Department could not impose political litmus tests on employees and job candidates, until it did.  The EPA and other Federal agencies could not edit their own scientific conclusions out of their published reports, until they did.

Changing "The Rules" on Clinton

David Brooks, with his inimitable instinct for oversimplification, has posed a false choice for Barack Obama: get into a "knife fight" with Clinton or refuse to counterattack now that it seems that "Clinton attacked him, and the attacks worked." Brooks mocks the Obama campaign's purported belief that "they can go on the attack, but in the right way. They can be tough and keep their virginity, too."

The last time things got nasty, before South Carolina, Obama shut down the Clinton attack machine for two months by very coolly pointing out that the Clinton's well-known truthiness problems undercut their credibility and hence Hillary's chance to build the "working majority" that Bill Clinton failed to build. In other words, he offered an essentially accurate critique of her Rovian attacks and integrated that critique into his pitch to reform our political process. I think he'll find a way to do that again -- by challenging the Clintons to the kind of disclosure (tax records, donations to the Clinton Library and Foundation, etc.) that they cannot withstand, and by continuing to debunk Hillary's ridiculous claims to substantive foreign policy experience.

It is not true, as Brooks asserts, that Obama"has never explained how this new politics would actually produce bread-and-butter benefits to people in places like Youngstown and Altoona." Obama has been explicit and precise on this point. He will get those "bread-and-butter-benefits" enacted by appealing to independents and Republicans as well as to Democrats; he will take the poison out of the political process by building a "working majority" that will ease partisanship and thus empower him to move to the substantive process reform of curbing lobbyist power. The appeal beyond the party base is grounded in part on the 'demonstration effect' of his clean campaign; in part on his eloquent appeal to broad American values; and in part on his channeling of Reagan, which is built on a genuine respect for the last "transformative" president -- a respect that conservatives can sense. At the same time, the promise of a new politics is wrapped around a frankly liberal, untriangulated policy platform that, if passed, will counter the tides of income inequality and risk transfer from the community to the individual.

Back in January, Obama found a way to shut down the Clinton attack machine without getting into the gutter. He bought himself two months, during which time he became the frontrunner. Now that desperation has led Hillary to a more deeply malicious and misleading set of attacks, I believe he'll find a way to stymie her once again. "Virginity" is a snidely charged way of casting what he stands to lose. I believe that he will highlight Clinton's weaknesses without losing his integrity.

Related posts:
Audacity of Respect: What Obama Owes to Reagan II
Truth and Transformation
Obama: Man, those Klinton Kids are Something
The Lying Clinton Meme

postdemocratic society

What if the U.S. is the first postdemocratic society? That is, a society in which marketing techniques have grown so successful that they overwhelm democratic discourse as we know it, so that even the most thoughtful, able and public interest-minded elected officials cannot develop good policy and legislation and cannot speak anything approaching the truth as they see it if they have any hope of being elected. This past week Maureen Dowd and David Brooks, the acid and alkaline of the NYT op-ed page, each suggested as much -- Dowd in a dismissive rundown of the political pollster Mark Penn's microtargeting techniques as described in his new book Microtrends, and Brooks in a sympathetic recounting of Representative Deborah Pryce's alleged disgust after allowing the Republican attack machine to go to work on her behalf in the last election.

Holding office in a postdemocratic society would be something like competing in a sport in which steroid abuse is rife: if you don't cheat, you can't compete. We may need whole new types and theories of regulation, not to "level" the playing field -- between the two major parties it is quite level -- but to improve the quality of play.

I would begin by throwing out the perverse notion that advertising needs the full untrammeled protections of free speech. Lawyers in some states accept tight restrictions on their advertising. Why can't elected officials? Can no one challenge the notion that meaningful political debate can be carried out in paid 30-second spots?

Ditto for campaign finance. As the advantage shifts to the Democrats, we may see our last opportunity for a stand-down -- that is, for a negotiation in which each side shows awareness that under current rules the advantage may someday swing to the other side. As long as Republicans were in power, it was clear that the only changes to the status quo they'd countenance were those that furthered their chance of a permanent majority. The 2006 election opened a window, not only because Democrats are less ruthless in partisan warfare, and because their margin is so thin, but because the memory of a turnaround is fresh.

As the Bush era comes to a close, I wonder whether American democracy will self-correct as it has done in the past, or whether the democratic process has become so skewed by money and marketing technology that true course corrections -- i.e., those with a measure of bipartisan input and buy-in -- are no longer possible.