Brendan Nyhan

It’s always surprising to me how few people understand the impeachment process. Under the Constitution, the House impeaches federal officials and then the Senate votes on whether to convict them and remove them from office or not. Impeachment is not equivalent to removal from office.

The New York Times made this mistake for the second time in the last six months on Sunday:

Because of an editing error, an article in the Week in Review section on Sunday about the conservative movement misstated the outcome of impeachment proceedings in 1998 against President Clinton, whose character conservatives made the focus of the 2000 election. The House of Representatives did indeed impeach him. (The Senate did not convict him of the impeachment charges.)

Back in December, the Times was forced to correct its own correction of an article about Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL), who was impeached and then removed from the federal bench as a result of bribery allegations:

Correction: December 1, 2006

A front-page article on Wednesday about Representative Nancy Pelosi’s decision not to pick Representative Alcee L. Hastings to be chairman of the House Intelligence Committee misstated the timing of Mr. Hastings’s acquittal in a bribery case. He was acquitted in a criminal trial in 1983, not after he was impeached by the Senate and removed as a federal district judge in 1989.

Correction: December 8, 2006

A front-page article on Nov. 29 about Representative Nancy Pelosi’s decision not to pick Representative Alcee L. Hastings to be chairman of the House Intelligence Committee misstated the timing of Mr. Hastings’s acquittal in a bribery case. He was acquitted in a criminal trial in 1983, not after he was impeached and removed as a federal district judge in 1989. A correction in this space last Friday misidentified the body that impeached him. It was the House, not the Senate. (Officials are tried by the Senate and either acquitted or automatically removed from office if convicted.)

Time for some remedial civics classes…

After approvingly quoting a Wall Street Journal op-ed (sub. req.) suggesting that political extremists impose externalities on the rest of us, Harvard economist Greg Mankiw makes the misguided suggestion that universities should have ideological affirmative action:

To foster tolerance, what we need is more interaction among people with opposite viewpoints. How about a student exchange program between Harvard and Liberty University? Or an affirmative action program to hire more Republicans for the Harvard faculty? Now that would be real diversity.

As I wrote last year, hiring based on politics is a mistake that will make the problem of classroom politicization worse. Here’s what Mike Munger, a Duke poli sci professor who serves on my dissertation committee (and is also running for governor as a Libertarian), said on the subject (Quicktime video):

You asking me “what are my political views” belongs outside the classroom. Now there are plenty of people on the left who don’t do that. They’re bad teachers. That’s not an issue of political repression. They’re bad teachers, and I would say the same thing about someone on the right who did that. The last thing that I want is a university or department of equal numbers of people on the left and right who impose their views on students.

So the solution is not to hire more people on the right. The solution is to take politics out of the classroom, to develop a norm of pedagogy that says “I challenge students to try to get them to think.”

That’s exactly right.

Thank goodness for the members of the “world’s greatest deliberative body.” What would we do without insights like this?

Hours before the great immigration debate began in the Senate yesterday, Sen. Jeff Sessions was polishing his arguments at a news conference in a park across from the Capitol.

“This bill,” the Alabama Republican told the cameras, “is not going to save Social Security. It’s not going to save Medicare. And it’s not going to balance the budget.”

Well, that’s true, Senator. It also won’t end the war in Iraq, cure cancer or cause the Nationals to win the pennant. It is, after all, an immigration bill.

Still, that non sequitur was as good a way as any to kick off what is becoming Congress’s annual immigration debate — a celebration of legislative futility.

Time for yet another reminder of why you can never, ever trust the Wall Street Journal editorial page. This is a basic rule for life — the intellectual equivalent of telling children not to talk to strangers.

Here’s what the Journal wrote (sub. req.) about a new Congressional Budget Office study (PDF) in an editorial titled “The Poor Get Richer”:

It’s been a rough week for John Edwards, and now comes more bad news for his “two Americas” campaign theme. A new study by the Congressional Budget Office says the poor have been getting less poor. On average, CBO found that low-wage households with children had incomes after inflation that were more than one-third higher in 2005 than in 1991.

The CBO results don’t fit the prevailing media stereotype of the U.S. economy as a richer take all affair — which may explain why you haven’t read about them. Among all families with children, the poorest fifth had the fastest overall earnings growth over the 15 years measured. (See the nearby chart.) The poorest even had higher earnings growth than the richest 20%. The earnings of these poor households are about 80% higher today than in the early 1990s.

The Journal then writes euphemistically that “Earnings growth tapered off as the economy slowed in the early part of this decade, but earnings for low-income families have still nearly doubled in the years since welfare reform became law.”

However, as TNR’s Jon Chait points out, the Journal fails to explain that earnings for the poor have actually declined under President Bush, nor does it recognize that comparisons between recession years and expansion years are essentially uninformative:

But wait. Why fifteen years? Well, it is a nice, round number. But fifteen years (from the last year where data) is available is 1991. That was a recession year, when incomes for this group collapsed. So the CBO study that Gregg demanded measures the change from a recession year to a boom year. Incomes for the poor — or anybody — always rise over the course of a business cycle. The measurement Gregg demanded is simply useless.

If you look closely at the study, you find that all the low-income growth occurred in the 1990s — more than all, in fact. It peaked in 2000, and has fallen since. One table in the study shows that low-income households with children had their income drop more than 10% from 2000 to 2005. You could take that point and argue that the Bush administration has made the poor poorer. That wouldn’t be a fair argument– Bush didn’t cause the 2001 recession — but it would be much fairer than the point Gregg and the Journal are making.

The interesting question is whether, by the time the current business cycle hits its peak, incomes for people at the bottom will recover to where they were at the peak of the last business cycle. As of 2005 they still haven’t caught up.

Figure 2 from the study (PDF) makes the point especially clearly:

…someone has a personalized license plate that says “Oust GW.”

Shockingly enough, Michael Moore has managed to stir up controversy in order to promote his new film “Sicko,” but as usual he’s playing dumb (PDF):

Well, going quietly to Cannes, I guess, was not to be. For some strange reason, on May 2nd the Bush administration initiated an action against me over how I obtained some of the content they believe is in my film. As none of them have actually seen the film (or so I hope!), they decided, unlike with “Fahrenheit 9/11,” not to wait until the film was out of the gate and too far down the road to begin their attack.

Bush’s Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson, launched an investigation of a trip I took to Cuba to film scenes for the movie. These scenes involve a group of 9/11 rescue workers who are suffering from illnesses obtained from working down at Ground Zero. They have received little or no help with their health care from the government. I do not want to give away what actually happens in the movie because I don’t want to spoil it for you (although I’m sure you’ll hear much about it after it unspools Saturday). Plus, our lawyers have advised me to say little at this point, as the film goes somewhere far scarier than “Cuba.” Rest assured of one thing: no laws were broken. All I’ve done is violate the modern-day rule of journalism that says, “ask no questions of those in power or your luncheon privileges will be revoked.”

This preemptive action taken by the Bush administration on the eve of the “Sicko” premiere in Cannes led our attorneys to fear for the safety of our film, noting that Secretary Paulson may try to claim that the content of the movie was obtained through a violation of the trade embargo that our country has against Cuba and the travel laws that prohibit average citizens of our free country from traveling to Cuba. (The law does not prohibit anyone from exercising their first amendment right of a free press and documentaries are protected works of journalism.)

I was floored when our lawyers told me this. “Are you saying they might actually confiscate our movie?” “Yes,” was the answer. “These days, anything is possible. Even if there is just a 20 percent chance the government would seize our movie before Cannes, does anyone want to take that risk?”

Certainly not. So there we were last week, spiriting a duplicate master negative out of the country just so no one from the government would take it from us…

I mean, folks, I have just about had it. Investigating ME because I’m trying to help some 9/11 rescue workers our government has abandoned? Once again, up is down and black is white. There are only two people in need of an investigation and a trial, and the desire for this across America is so widespread you don’t even need to see the one’s smirk or hear the other’s sneer to know who I am talking about.

But no, I’m the one who now has to hire lawyers and sneak my documentary out of the country just so people can see a friggin’ movie. I mean, it’s just a movie! What on earth could I have placed on celluloid that would require such a nonsensical action against me?

Ok. Scratch that.

Early reviews are positive, with the FoxNews.com critic writing that the film “shows a new maturity” and “never talks down or baits the audience.” But I’ll believe it when I see it. The lesson of our Spinsanity articles on Moore is simple: don’t trust anything he says unless it’s independently verified.

I’m out west for a wedding; more next week…

Time to pick up more intellectual garbage from Jerry Bowyer, a National Review Online financial “expert” who can’t reason his way out of a paper bag (see here, here, and here).

In his latest effort, Bowyer once again claims that the Laffer curve has been vindicated and that tax cuts increase revenue, a claim that even Bush economists disavow:

Last week, the Laffer curve, a much maligned though powerful predictive tool, got another notch in its belt: Tax revenues hit the highest one-day point in U.S. history.

Of course, there’s a bit more to the story. President Bush cut tax rates in 2003, and tax revenues have been climbing ever since — a trajectory the Laffer curve predicts when tax rates are made less prohibitive. The process may seem counterintuitive, yes. But anybody who bet against it lost out.

Note what’s missing from Bowyer’s account: the 2001 tax cut. Like the Treasury Department and the Wall Street Journal, Bowyer is cheating by focusing only on the period after the second Bush tax cut. That’s the great thing about cutting taxes repeatedly: when the economy picks up, you just point to the most recent tax cut and take credit.

More fundamentally, if tax cuts increased revenue, why is per capita revenue growth near zero since 2001 after adjusting for inflation? Bowyer’s cherry-picked data tell us nothing.

Update 5/23 2:43 PM: In a comment on this post, Bowyer writes the following:

[Y]our article above fails utterly to deal with my arguments. I have, repeatedly explained why I start the evaluation of the President’s economic policies in 2003. You ignore those reasons. In fact, you leave out that the fact than I was writing articles in 2001 in which I predicted (correctly) slow growth.

I’ll try once more. Tax cuts which leave out the wealthy have very little ability to stimulate the economy, because, well, the wealthy have more money. The 2001 cuts, almost completely deferred the high income bracket cuts. This omission is a pitiful oversight in your article.

I’ll defer to Bowyer on what he wrote in 2001 — I don’t read him that closely — but it’s ultimately irrelevant if he believed the 2001 tax cut would not work. By starting the timer in 2003, he’s stacking the deck in favor of his simplistic Laffer-style argument. And the size of one-day revenue collections is a useless measure of overall tax revenue.

For those who are interested, here’s a clip from the Dartmouth panel where we discuss blog fact-checking (posted with permission of the Rockefeller Center):

Other posts about the panel:
–Dartmouth panel report (4/19)
–Misleading report on Dartmouth blog panel (4/21)
–My disembodied voice at Dartmouth panel (4/24)

It’s amazing what so-called experts are allowed to publish in the country’s top publications, as Brad DeLong has noted in two important posts.

First, Joe Klein, a columnist for Time, wrote this about the role of experience in the 2008 election:

[I]t’s entirely possible that “experience” may be more of a disadvantage than an advantage in 2008.

There have been six elections in which control of the presidency has switched parties during the television age. In five of those six, starting with John F. Kennedy’s victory over Richard Nixon in 1960, the less experienced candidate won. The other four were: Jimmy Carter over Gerald Ford in 1976, Ronald Reagan over Carter in 1980, Bill Clinton over Bush the Elder in 1992, Bush the Younger over Al Gore in 2000. The one exception to the rule was a toss-up: Nixon and Hubert Humphrey had similar levels of experience in 1968. This sort of pattern may have deep significance. It may mean that when Americans want change, they want a powerful fresh gust of it. Or it may mean nothing at all in wartime.

But as Robert J. Waldmann points out (via DeLong), Klein’s statement makes no sense:

Joe Klein’s result is almost perfectly tautological as incumbency of one’s party and experience are almost perfectly correlated (perfectly correlated if one claims that 5 = 8 as he does in the case of Nixon and Humphrey). Thus, since 1960, we have known before election day that a switch of party would logically imply the election of the less experienced candidate. The observation that, surprise surprise, after election day, it became clear that when there was a switch of party the less experienced candidate won adds nothing to our knowledge whatsoever. Joseph Klein has presented an un-falsifiable hypothesis and drawn conclusions from the failure of the data to refute it. He demonstrates only that he does not reason well, but we already knew that didn’t we?

How can one of the nation’s top political columnists fail to understand incumbency? It’s staggering.

In addition, the New York Times continues to allow Ben Stein, who holds an undergraduate degree in economics, to bill himself as an “economist” in the tagline for his silly column, which he uses to publish nonsense like this:

[W]hy is unemployment so low when the economy is supposedly slowing rapidly? If gross domestic product grew at only roughly 1.5 percent in the first quarter of 2007, why is unemployment at barely 4.5 percent?

However, as DeLong notes, Stein’s argument also makes no sense:

The confusion between levels and changes is breathtaking. Unemployment is rising whenever GDP growth is slow (or negative). Unemployment is falling when GDP growth is high. But no chain of reasoning known to humanity would produce the expectation that slow GDP growth is associated with a high level of unemployment or that fast GDP growth is associated with a low level of unemployment. None. The fastest GDP growth on record since the Korean War came at the very start of 1983, when the unemployment rate was the highest it has been since the Great Depression.

It’s a misconception like… like… like this: “Dear Dr. Gridlock: I took my foot off the accelerator three second ago. Why is the car still going 60? Why doesn’t the car instantaneously stop when I take my foot off the accelerator?”

The title of Stein’s piece this week is apt, though: “Assorted Mysteries of Economic Life.” Given his (lack of) training, it might be an appropriate name for the column.