Real Americans Don't Need Their Pinkies Anyway

They discussed pros and cons, and the fact that Rice is retired and that the injury was to a relatively unimportant finger on his non-dominant hand. Still, the doctor tried to talk Rice into reattachment. "He disagreed with that plan," Carraway-Bowman said. "He left the tip of his finger with us and he went home."

William "9.75-Finger" Rice knows that a pinky finger (pink is just a shade of red, after all) is only useful for Harvard-educated liberal-socialist elites to stick out while they toast Osama Bin Laden with cups of green tea.

Everyone knows the most important finger -- the one you could least afford to lose -- is the middle one you raise towards the American flag at the secessionist rally; towards anyone who isn't white, heterosexual, or likes to quote Thomas Jefferson out of context; or towards the Constitution and any part of the Bill of Rights other than the 2nd or 10th amendments.

A close second is the index finger, which you need to pull the trigger on your AK-47 while you're watering the tree of liberty, etc.

In fact, every true tea-party patriot who opposes socialized medicine and government death panels (private-industry death panels are OK, just to be clear) should go straight to the kitchen, grab the biggest meat cleaver he can find (you do have several to choose from, don't you?) and lop that troublesome, Nazi-socialist-Marxist-terrorist-sympathizing digit right off, in protest. Hell, chop off several fingers, while you're at it. Don't even think about having them reattached, because emergency rooms in major-city trauma centers are mostly taxpayer-subsidized by the goddamn nanny-state government.

And come to think of it, this business about opposable thumbs has to be a communist plot...

[cross-posted at Blue Mass Group]

The Great Social Security Con, Part XLVIII

When someone like Debra Saunders takes it into her head to write about Social Security, you just know it won't end well. She starts with a summary of a Christopher Buckley novel (Christopher Buckley being, of course, one of our finest and most incisive thinkers on thorny socio-economic questions)...and it goes downhill from there:

According to Harry Zeeve of the bipartisan budget watchdog group, the Concord Coalition, Boomsday falls some time next year, as the first Baby Boomers become eligible for early retirement at age 62 in 2008.

Things will only get worse. The Concord Coalition figures that by 2018, Social Security will spend more than it takes in. (Medicare already spends more than it takes in.) In 1960, there were 5.1 workers for every 1 retiree. Today, the ratio is 3.3 to 1. By 2040, it will shrink to 2.1 to 1....

President Bush has made matters worse -- by pushing yet another entitlement, a prescription drug program that spends more than it takes in. With the 2008 presidential election looming, Washington won't touch entitlement reform until 2010 -- if then.

It doesn't help that Washington politicians know that older people -- the folks most likely to get more money from Social Security than they paid into the system -- vote. Which means Washington may not try to implement reforms to avoid federal bankruptcy until it is so late that any fix will be exceedingly painful. And extremely necessary, as the Congressional Budget Office estimates that entitlement spending and interest payments will consume 100 percent of federal revenues in 2020....

The Concord Coalition argues that Washington needs "a fiscal wake-up call." But as long as the Un-Greatest Generation produces politicians who get elected to higher office by spending more than the government takes in, that call will never happen....

And: "What happened to the concept of bequeathing our children a better world?" The answer: That was for the last generation. Not us.

Stop and savor the jaw-dropping chutzpah of this. Bill Clinton, whom Saunders hates with a fiery passion, built up a budget surplus in order to fund Social Security. Gore, whom she hates even more than Clinton, would have kept the surplus safe for exactly that purpose. Bush, whom Saunders defends more often than she (ever so mildly) rebukes, blew the wad on tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy. Clinton and Gore: in favor of the bequeathing; Bush: opposed. These are the three basic, essential facts without which any discussion of Social Security is an exercise in willful ignorance. Saunders ignores all of them.

But, as I said, we knew this would end badly. Less expected and more depressing: that the Chronicle would devote an entire page to ill-informed and misleading anti-Social Security propaganda, including charts helpfully provided by the Concord Coalition and a stunningly shallow and ignorant commentary by one Caille Millner, who apparently (god save us) is a Chronicle editorial writer. Some excerpts to give you the general flavor:

ALL RIGHT, Boomers. Even if you haven't read Christopher Buckley's satirical novel "Boomsday," you've probably read about how your generation is on the verge of bankrupting the ones who come after you....

I'm sure you're shaking your heads as you read this, thinking how terrible, what a shame, but you still have no plans to give up your Social Security checks. After all, it's not as if the Boomers created the system, they just have to live with it (It's so tough to be a Boomer, isn't it? How do you manage to function, always getting victimized by the Man?).

Enter Mr. Buckley, who perhaps feels the same sort of resentment toward his generation as others do (Why will they never pack up their psychedelics, their self-righteousness, their dreadful Grateful Dead albums and their habit of insisting that the Vietnam War was the *worst*thing*ever -- and move offstage?)....

We don't want to fight the Man -- we want to be the Man....No doubt these beliefs were formed in response to the Boomers' hypocrisy and self-absorption, just as the Boomers' beliefs were shaped in reaction to what they deemed the stodginess of their parents....

Some experts have projected that, in order to maintain Social Security at its current benefit level, Congress would need to raise payroll taxes to 50 percent or more...Can you see my generation, obsessed as we are with making money and having families, agreeing to that? I can't.

And so that leaves us with only one option -- to default....We're not going to kill you off, Boomers, as much as we'd like to sometimes, but we're not going to pay for your old age, either. All the more reason to not only accept but lobby for cuts in benefits now -- before you turn to younger workers for a handout, and realize that we've fled for higher ground.

Yes, we're talking stereotypes so broad and simple-minded that your average braindead wingnut gibe would be ashamed to be seen with them.

Note that both Saunders and Millner conclude that the 'only' solution is to cut benefits--because the 'only' alternative is confiscatory payroll taxes. Both, whether dishonestly or stupidly, buy into the imaginary accounting that arbitrarily disallows funding Social Security from anything but payroll taxes (I think for Saunders it's more of the former, and for Millner more of the latter).

But the dishonesty goes much further than just how to fund Social Security. As Ezra Klein points out (repeatedly), the problem is not Social Security (which is 'insolvent' only under the most pessimistic assumptions, and only at a date that each year moves further into the future) but Medicare (the cost of which is spiralling out of control). Just for perspective: according to the (exceedingly pessimistic) Social Security Trustees' Report, Social Security can be 'fixed' with a 16% increase in payroll taxes; Medicare would take a 122% increase to fund over the long run.

And as Ezra further points out, when we talk about the problem of Medicare, we're really talking about the problem of health care costs in general--the non-Medicare portion of which is rising even more rapidly than Medicare costs. The real problem won't be 'fixed' by cutting benefits or increasing payroll taxes, but by massive change in the health care system as a whole.

All of this said, Millner is almost right in one respect: there really is a tremendous inter-generational injustice being perpetrated here. It's the shifting of the tax burden from taxpayers today to taxpayers in the future (and, more to the point, from wealthy taxpayers to middle- and lower-class taxpayers). This shift is not just something Bush did, it's GOP policy; it's not just GOP policy, it's their fundamental raison d'etre. This is the core of Millner's astonishing stupidity: there is an egregious injustice and an easily identifiable culprit, and Millner never notices either one.

Who Pays?

Thinking about this post, I realized that I had glossed over a key element of Samuelson's dishonesty.

In arguing that shortfalls require benefit cuts, Samuelson simply assumes that the money should come from beneficiaries--not out of insurer profits, not out of pharmaceutical industry profits, and not out of the pockets of the wealthy. Samuelson's column is really about who should pay, but he disguises it as an argument for the necessity of paying--thus allowing him to slip in his conclusion without ever having to argue it.

Last week, Michael Medved took time outf from attacking left-wing propaganda films like Happy Feet¹ to recite the standard right-wing talking points against progressive taxation (hat tip: Amanda). Short version: taxing the rich is unfair, hurts the economy, invites evasion, and reduces tax revenues (all of which Amanda ably dispatches).

It relies on dishonesty akin to Samuelson's: Medved pretends that the question is whether to pay, rather than who pays. In arguing that the wealthy should pay less, Medved is really arguing that the poor and middle-class should pay more, but he knows that won't sell, so he tries to make it an argument against taxes in general.

This sort of dishonesty is essential to Republican arguments on domestic policy. The granddaddy of all these lies is the chimera known as a 'tax cut'. They dress it up as something for everyone (much more for some, of course) to make people think there really is a free lunch. In reality, they're shifting taxes--from Paris Hilton, now, to middle class families, in the future--and the kicker is that with additional interest figured in it's really a tax increase. It's a truth so necessary and obvious and yet so widely ignored that they should make kids recite it every day in school, make it part of the Pledge of Allegiance: there is no such thing as a tax cut.

Now, your standard-issue conservative will counter this with the assertion that it isn't tax-shifting if there are also spending cuts. The obvious point is that it doesn't happen that way (the last six years have proven that pretty decisively); the less obvious but more important point is that someone still pays: Medicare patients, people on government assistance, poor and middle-class college students, people harmed by pollution, people who visit national parks--all of the above, and more. It isn't about whether to pay; it's always about who pays.

Liberals are pretty clear about who we think should pay, and why. We think the biggest share should come from those at the top of the ladder--because they can pay without discomfort; because they get the greatest benefit from government; because whatever drive and hard work and talent may have gone into getting them where they are, they still wouldn't have gotten there without relying on infrastructure paid for by previous generations.

These are winning arguments, as long as it's understood that somebody has to pay. That's the problem, and that's the opportunity. That's the point we need to hammer over and over and over until it becomes as reflexive as Medved's talking points. If it's about whether to pay, they win; if it's about who pays, we win. We need to make damn sure it's always about who pays.


¹I kid you not.

[That's all, folks]

Samuelson: Still Dishonest about Entitlements

There's one honest line in Robert Samuelson's latest column calling for cuts in Social Security and Medicare. It's the line where he says "...I've written all this before..."

Otherwise...not so much.

Here's Samuelson:

Nancy Pelosi promises to "build a better future for all of America's children." If she were serious, she would back cuts in Social Security and Medicare.

Social Security and Medicare. See what's wrong with that?

This is one of those zombie arguments that keeps coming back no matter how many times you kill it. I'll let Dean Baker respond (from last August, but still pertinent):

There are modest and manageable increases in projected Social Security spending due to the aging of the population. There are unmanageable projected increases in Medicare and Medicaid expenditures due to a projected explosion in health care costs....Honest people respond to these projections by examining ways to prevent the explosion in health care costs. Less honest people talk about the need to cut entitlement spending, including Social Security.

Health care costs: not mentioned in Samuelson's column.

That's not the full extent of Samuelson's dishonesty. He repeatedly harps on the need to cut benefits, but is dismissive about the option of raising taxes instead (e.g., making payroll taxes less regressive by eliminating the earnings cap). He takes a plague-on-both-your-houses tone that grossly misstates relative culpability (the Democrats didn't get us into this mess) while giving his views a veneer of moderation (he's firmly in the right-wing camp on this issue).

And most galling of all, he chastizes Clinton for not being honest about the problem--for "falsely denouncing the Republicans for attempting to 'destroy' Medicare." What Samuelson doesn't mention is that Clinton's budget surpluses were meant to ensure the long-term stability of Social Security...and they would have, if Bush hadn't squandered them on free money for the ultrawealthy. Or, for that matter, if the Republicans in Congress hadn't gone on a six-year drunken spending binge (including, of course, a vastly expensive prescription drug 'benefit' that does more for the drug companies than for seniors). Either way, the problem was solved until the Republicans blew it.

[That's all, folks]

Gotcha...Or Maybe Not

Yes, Mickey Kaus is still an idiot.

Kaus nails Krugman for this quote in yesterday's column:

[Bush] waited until after the election to reveal that what he really wanted to do was privatize Social Security.

Which, Kaus seems to think, is definitively and positively refuted by this excerpt from a (pre-election) NYT story on the campaign:

At a rally in Pennsylvania last week, Mr. Bush declared, as he does at almost every campaign stop nowadays, that "younger workers ought to be able to take some of their taxes and set up a personal savings account, an account that they can call their own, an account that the government cannot take away and an account that they can pass on from one generation to the next."

Never mind that this story doesn't actually mention the word 'privatize'. The real stupidity here is that Kaus ignores the absurd lengths the Republican party went to in order to keep reporters from using the word 'privatize' (more here, in Kaus's own magazine).

Nor did Kaus bother to check if Bush himself ever used the word 'privatize' in the context of Social Security. (Answer: not in anything recorded at whitehouse.gov.)

What Krugman is talking about is this deception, the deliberate omission and attempted suppression of the word 'privatize'. Kaus, in other words, plays gotcha with Krugman by completely ignoring the exact thing Krugman is talking about.

But then, that's what makes him Mickey Kaus.

[That's all, folks]

Shape of the World: Opinions Differ, Part CXLVIII

Today's Chronicle has a front-page article that exemplifies all the worst attributes of journalistic 'balance', squeezing the facts into a Procrustean bed of moral equivalence.

First, here's the part of the story that's worth reading--the part that should be the lead:

The Bush tax cuts will total about $2 trillion over the next decade according to the Congressional Budget Office....And by failing to restrain spending, Bush has made his tax cuts unsustainable without draconian spending cuts that neither the White House nor Republicans in Congress support.

In a sense, Bush's tax cuts, which are set to expire within five years, are a phantom, analysts said, paid for with borrowed money that portends much steeper taxes after he leaves office....

[T]he biggest parts of the Bush tax cuts directly benefit wealthy taxpayers. These include reduced rates on the upper-income brackets, the capital gains and dividends tax cut and phasing out the estate tax....

The problem for Republicans is that while cutting taxes, they have allowed spending to surge. Brian Riedl, a Heritage Foundation budget analyst, calculated that federal spending under Bush has risen twice as fast as under former President Bill Clinton, a Democrat.

Now let's look at the story as it actually ran.

Start with the headline:

Dems, GOP give tax cuts political twist
Both sides spin issue in effort to gain edge in election year

Both sides spin, and both sides twist. It's a terrible headline from a factual standpoint, but I give them credit for capturing the tone of the story.

And here's how the article begins:

A clash over the domestic crown jewel of the Bush presidency -- the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, with looming expiration dates -- has emerged as a central theme of the Democrats' campaign to retake control of Congress this November.

Children, widows, the elderly, farmers, veterans, students, working mothers -- every vulnerable group short of puppies -- is to be sacrificed at the altar of the Bush tax cuts that benefit America's richest citizens, Democrats claim. "Democrats will fight the president's anti-widow and anti-children agenda," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, announced last week.

Added Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.: "After creating record deficits and debt with his budget-busting tax breaks, the president is asking our seniors, our students and our families to clean up his fiscal mess."

Okay, then. Let's stipulate that 'anti-widow and anti-children' is a little hyperbolic. With that qualification, is it wrong? Are widows and children, students and seniors, not disproportionately affected by Bush's proposed budget? Ms. Lochhead doesn't tell us, instead moving on to the Competing Claim:

President Bush, who is struggling to extend the capital gains and dividends tax cuts while paring the budget, countered that his tax cuts are essential to the economy and keeping Democrats' hands off taxpayers' money. He waved off budget concerns.

"If Congress doesn't act, your taxes are going to go up, and you're not going to like it," Bush told a New Hampshire business group last week. "You will hear the argument during the budget debates -- you know, all the noise coming out of Washington -- that you need to raise taxes in order to balance the budget. I've been there long enough to tell you that's not the way Washington works. They're going to raise your taxes, and they're going to find new ways to spend your money."

Interestingly enough, that isn't how it happened the last time we raised taxes to deal with the deficit. (Of course, we had a Democrat in office then...so it's really an unfair comparison.) Once again, though, there's no independent assessment of the claim. True? False? Truthy? Falselike? Who the hell knows, based on this story? All we really know is that Democrats claim one thing, and Republicans claim another.

Most of the rest of the story continues in this vein:

Underneath the flamboyant talk, budget experts say, both parties are teeing up their constituents for a nasty surprise....

Democrats actually like many specific Bush tax cuts, even as they trash them in the aggregate. Democrats also are fighting to roll back taxes on the same upper-income voters whom they claim should be paying more -- those earning between $200,000 and $500,000 a year. But these rich live in the blue states Democrats dominate like California and New York.

Reversing the Bush tax cuts alone cannot restore fiscal balance, analysts agree. This will require the very spending restraint that Democrats daily condemn....

"The Democrats tend to say, 'Well, if we just repeal these tax cuts, our problems are solved,' " said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office. "False. Republicans tend to say, 'Geez, if we have these dividends and capital gains, we'll grow our way out of it.' Also false....No one plays that game straight in my view," Holtz-Eakin said....

The top 50 percent of income earners pay almost all the individual income tax, and the top 5 percent pay more than half of it -- 53.8 percent -- according to the Treasury. That means any income tax cut will chiefly benefit top earners.....To offset this effect, the Bush tax cuts included an expensive array of tax breaks for the poor and middle class, including a new 10 percent bracket, a child tax credit, a refundable earned income tax credit, a savers' credit, marriage penalty relief and other tax breaks Democrats strongly endorse.

Democrats also favor fat business tax breaks such as the research and development credit....

The underlying problem for both parties is that the government is deep in red ink on the eve of the Baby Boomers' retirement. When these 76 million people stop paying taxes and begin collecting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, starting in two years, they will swamp the government's resources and could provoke a financial crisis, analysts predict. [emphases added]

Get the picture? The Democrats are part of the problem. It's everybody's fault. Both sides are being less thna honest. When you come right down to it, they're really all the same.

This sort of lazy, facile pseudo-analysis avoids asking any questions that would undermine the assumption of Democratic-Republican equivalence. Questions like: what is the size of Bush's 'tax breaks for the poor and middle class' relative to the total? What Democrats 'daily condemn' spending restraint? Who's actually responsible for the current situation? If it isn't the party controlling congress and the Executive branch, why not? Didn't Clinton's policies generate surpluses that were designed to avoid exactly the crisis this article warns about?

The byline on the story is Carolyn Lochhead; longtime Chronicle readers may remember her (as I do) for writing aggressively skeptical stories about Clinton pretty much from the first day of his presidency. Ironically, if you do a Google blog search you'll find that it's mostly wingnuts complaining about her nowadays. To be honest, I don't really know if she has some ideological agenda she's pursuing (but if she does I'm pretty sure it isn't a liberal agenda). I don't think that's the problem with this story. The problem is the unstated assumption that 'balance' means assuming moral equivalence even when one party is being relatively reasonable and the other has gone completely off the deep end.

[That's all, folks]

Prescription Drug Fiasco: The Story So Far

It was a bad bill, pushed by industry lobbyists...

The Bush administration went to great lengths to hide the real cost before the vote...

In a stunning abuse of the rules, the Republican leadership kept the vote open for three hours in order to twist enough arms to pass it...

They also tried to bribe/threaten at least one opponent, an action for which DeLay was later reprimanded by the ethics committee...

The administration ran taxpayer-funded ads for the benefit that a GAO investigation found inaccurate and partisan...

When it kicks in, it's a fiasco, leaving a lot of people with no coverage. It arbitrarily excludes certain classes of drug. The problems, it turns out were all predicted in a GAO report issued last December...

As a result of the gaps in coverage, some states are forced to take up the slack...

The problems with the program add up to a nightmare for the GOP...

So to fix these problems, the administration is taking bold, decisive action: another (taxpayer-funded) PR blitz.

This is the story of Republican 'government' in its purest form.

[That's all, folks]