Brendan Nyhan

The grassroots (and Gov. Arnold) are calling for an end to incumbent protection rackets from coast to coast. The New York Times

The politically charged methods that states use to draw Congressional districts are under attack by citizens groups, state legislators and the governor of California, all of whom are concerned that increasingly sophisticated map-drawing has created a class of entrenched incumbents, stifled electoral competition and caused governmental gridlock.

(Past posts on redistricting reform here.)

In the Times today, Edmund Andrews we’ve known for some time now — namely, that the administration’s fraudulent deficit-cutting “plan” is unlikely to lead to substantial deficit reduction.

But what’s strange is that the administration and prominent conservatives are conceding more and more factual ground after years of up-is-downism (like Bush’s claim that the 2001 tax cut reduced the deficit).

First, as Josh Marshall points out, Vice President Cheney conceded that private accounts require massive long-term borrowing, saying on “Fox News Sunday,” “We’re going to borrow $758 [b]illion over the next 10 years to set up the personal retirement accounts. We think that’s a manageable amount … Trillions more after that.”

OMB spokesman Chad Kolton told Andrews that the administration’s alleged plan remains operative, which is to be expected, but check out the Heritage Foundation’s Brian Reidl blatantly contradicting the administration:

Even Mr. Bush’s conservative allies have warned that those inflows will not be enough to cover the continued growth in overall government spending. Brian Riedl, budget analyst at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group here, estimated that deficits would remain around $400 billion through 2009 if current spending trends on Iraq and major benefit programs continued.

For Mr. Bush to fulfill his promise of cutting the deficit in half by 2009, Mr. Riedl said, the president would have to cut $200 billion from domestic programs that now cost less than $500 billion a year.

“There is no way you can reach that goal by cutting only discretionary spending,” Mr. Riedl said. “You have to go after entitlements as well.”

And a senior administration official recently conceded that private accounts would not alleviate the Social Security funding gap.

What’s going on? Are the facts no longer biased? Is the administration rejoining the “reality-based community” instead of “creating other new realities”? Inquiring minds want to know.

(If I had to guess, these admissions will spark a run of bad press, and the candor will soon cease. This is what happened in the aftermath of the war in Iraq when the administration briefly offered concessions on the “sixteen words” about uranium from Niger.)

Richard Clarke kicks off his New York Times Magazine column with February 7, 2005

Private account opponents are becoming annoyingly glib about the real financing issues that Social Security faces, which is only going to make it harder to muster the political will that we’re going to need to alleviate the shortfall (either now or down the road). So I was happy to see Jeff Madrick offer an intellectually honest take on the problem in Salon:

[T]here are genuine concerns. For years now, baby boomers and others have been paying more in payroll taxes than has been needed to meet the needs of retirees. The federal government has of course spent the surplus, but it has placed Treasury bonds in a trust fund to be paid off when needed. And needed they may well be around 2018 when, as the president noted, Social Security payments will begin to exceed the payroll taxes collected.

Will the bonds be paid off? Of course they will. The Treasury will not renege on its obligations. But there will also be pressures on the budget, and Democrats are too flippant about this. If the nation is still in deficit, other programs may have to be cut or the Treasury may have to borrow more in the financial markets.

When the trust fund is eventually run down — the Social Security Administration estimates that will happen around 2042, but some think it won’t happen until the 2050s — the system, based on current projections, will surely need new sources of revenues or cuts in benefits paid.

The problem is not so much the projected date of trust fund insolvency — a highly uncertain projection — but the increasing strain on the federal budget once Social Security moves into deficit and begins to redeem the Treasury bonds it has accumulated. Medicare’s rapidly increasing costs and the general fund deficit are bigger problems, but Social Security’s funding gap is a significant concern (and one that private accounts do nothing to solve). Good for Madrick.

If only Nixon could go to China, maybe only George W. Bush our disastrous agricultural subsidy programs. I’m sure Congress will hold the line this time around — agricultural states are vastly overrepresented in the Senate relative to population — but it’s a start, at least:

President Bush will seek deep cuts in farm and commodity programs in his new budget and in a major policy shift will propose overall limits on subsidy payments to farmers, administration officials said Saturday.

Such limits would help reduce the federal budget deficit and would inject market forces into the farm economy, the officials said.

The proposal puts Mr. Bush at odds with some of his most ardent supporters in the rural South, including cotton and rice growers in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi.

The new chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Thad Cochran of Mississippi, and more than 100 farm groups are gearing up to fight the White House proposal. The administration’s willingness to push the proposal, despite such protests, suggests how tight the new budget will be.

Most of the subsidies are paid to large farm operators growing cotton and rice and, to a lesser degree, corn, soybeans and wheat.

Mr. Bush would set a firm overall limit of $250,000 on subsidies that can now exceed $1 million in some cases.

In the Times article, officials at both the lefty Environmental Working Group and the conservative Heritage Foundation make a case against subsidies — how often do you see a combination like that? Bush’s proposal may be a signal that the left-right anti-subsidy coalition is gaining ground.

Update 2/7: Ezra Klein agrees, but points out that Bush signed a bad farm bill that exacerbated the problem in 2002 — a good point.

During a visit to Nebraska yesterday, President Bush made the following set of claims:

[A] personal retirement account will earn a greater rate of return than that which your money earns in the Social Security trust. That’s an important point for people to understand. If you invest your money in conservative stocks and bonds, you’re likely to get around a 4 percent rate of return, which is greater than double than the money you’re earning right now in the Social Security trust. And over time, that means your own money will grow faster than that which is in the Social Security trust. In other words, you’ll have more money when it comes time to retire. That’s what that means. And that’s an important concept.

First, it’s not necessarily true that a private account will perform better than Social Security as Bush and other White House officials repeatedly assert, though it is likely over the long run based on the historical performance of the stock market. Treasury Secretary John Snow admitted this possibility on the December 19, 2004 edition of “Fox News Sunday”:

They [younger workers] take money that would be going into the system, it gets put into these personal accounts. They reduce their claim on the system, but they get the personal accounts as a nest egg, which will grow faster, at least have the opportunity to grow faster, than the reduction in the payout from Social Security itself.

In addition, Bush is falsely implying that the appropriate comparison is between a 4 percent rate of return for private accounts and a 1-2% rate of return for the normal guaranteed benefit. But this is misleading. The “benefit offset” that he never mentions would reduce guaranteed benefits for private account holders by 3 percent per year above inflation, so workers would only increase their net benefit if their annual returns are greater than 3 percent. This isn’t fine print; it’s the way the plan would work, and Bush is directly misleading his audience about it.

The American Prospect’s Garance Franke-Ruta passes along an astute observation on Tapped:

One of the smartest centrists I know recently noted that Dean will be operating, in Washington, under “Hillary Rules.” This is certainly true; anything Dean says will be subjected to tremendous scrutiny, and he will be operating with no room for error. And so perhaps the best choice for Dean would to be follow Hillary Clinton’s lead by putting his head to the grindstone, staying off television, and quietly going to work. Already, there is some indication that he recognizes this may be his best course of action.

That’s pretty sanguine. Reporters are going to have keyboard shortcuts that output stories like “Temperamental DNC chairman Howard Dean today said ‘[stupid, off-the-cuff remark]’, offending [various blue state voters]. [Crazed left-wing blogger] defended the remark, alleging a media conspiracy driven by Fox News.” It’s like Mad Libs.

The problem Dean has is that the media narrative has been written, and once established they are almost impossible to break (see: Al Gore is a liar, George Bush is stupid, etc.). And because Democrats have so few compelling personalities in the spotlight, the press will go over everything Dean says with a fine-tooth comb. Plus, if he couldn’t restrain his rhetoric during a campaign to be president of the United States, why would anyone think he could do it now?

The Democrats will soon regret the way they ran their selection process, which was shockingly incompetent and venal. Allowing your party chairmanship to be determined by open pandering to 447 DNC members is not “democratic,” as Noam Scheiber points out; it’s just bad politics.

Lori Robertson has a long article in American Journalism Review about the relationship between the White House and the press. It covers most of the same ground as chapter 2 of All the President’s Spin, but Robertson’s piece is noteworthy for demonstrating how far the press and DC establishment have come toward acquiesing to the Bush style.

Here’s the most important part of the lede:

The press has been butting up against this brick wall of White House communication policy, and complaining about it, for long enough that stories about on-message, no leaks, no dissent, et cetera, et cetera are becoming a bit clichéd. Some people are tired of hearing about it.

“Stop whining, all you nattering nabobs,” says Stephen Hess, senior fellow emeritus at the Brookings Institution and a professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University. “Put yourself in the president’s shoes and say, ‘What’s wrong with the way he did it?’.. That doesn’t mean future presidents will do it.”

Problem is, future presidents may very well do it. Many interviewed for this story suspect–and fear–that this administration’s strategy will be a template for subsequent commanders in chief. An emphasis on tighter news management has been building as each successive administration learns from the previous one. A rigid approach to staying on message and a clampdown on access for reporters and the public have been increasingly used by the executive branch, a trend that began to take shape during the Reagan administration, if not earlier. The current Bush administration has shown that the method can be perfected, with little to no downside for the White House.

…Reporters and open-government advocates speak, often passionately, about why less and less access to the executive branch hurts the public’s right to know. But from an administration’s point of view, what’s the incentive to talk more with the media? Better press coverage? That’s not likely.

There’s “no doubt in my mind, the next administration”–whether it’s Democratic or Republican–“will build on what the Bush administration has been able to do,” says McMasters.

Stop whining? Might as well. The press might want to get used to it.

Robertson asks a number of political operatives and journalists what incentive a future White House would have to not behave like Bush, and the answers she gets are “intangible and hypothetical,” “awfully wispy and idealistic,” and so forth. She offers some suggestions that reporters should go outside normal channels to dig up new information, but that’s about it.

If the conclusion of one of the leading publications in American journalism is that reporters “might want to get used” to being manipulated and stonewalled, we’re in big trouble. The outrage is fading, and being replaced by complacence as journalists realize how little leverage they have. If you want to see how bad things can get, read Paul Farhi’s Washington Post article on the requirement that journalists covering an inaugural ball be followed by a “minder” at all times — a potentially disturbing trend if it continues.

PS The article included updated press conference statistics, which illustrate the vast disparity between Bush and his predecessors – as of December 20, 2004, Bush had held 17 press conferences, compared with 44 by Bill Clinton and 84 by George H.W. Bush at the same point in their terms.

(Disclosure: Robertson quoted me in a recent AJR story on coverage of campaign 2004.)

I’ll have a lot more to say about the Republican Social Security memo (PDF), but I have to start by joining Matthew Yglesias in ridiculing this passage from a suggested speech, which might be the dumbest thing I’ve ever read:

Let me leave you with a question: Why should young people who will retire around the year 2035 be forced to live with a system that was invented in 1935, especially when that system is in such deep trouble?

So many things have since changed then. When Social Security was created the Golden Gate Bridge didn’t exist and neither did Mount Rushmore. You couldn’t see the Wizard of Oz because it hadn’t been filmed and Cheerios hadn’t been introduced as a breakfast cereal. Americans in 1935 couldn’t imagine our world of cell phones, computers, or landing a man on the moon—and that was more than 30 years ago!

Times have changed, even if the values behind Social Security haven’t. Young people ought to have a chance to do it differently than their grandparents. So let’s press our leaders for this change now, and start putting money into personal accounts as soon as possible.

No Cheerios? We must get add private accounts to Social Security immediately!

In the New York Times this morning, the White House

[A] spokesman for the White House, Trent Duffy, said, “The president welcomes comments from members of Congress about how to fix Social Security, as opposed to those who want to ignore the problem and leave our children and grandchildren empty handed.”

In fact, according to the Social Security actuaries, no one will be left “empty handed.” In 2042, when the trust fund is projected to be exhausted, the system will be able to pay approximately 73 percent of scheduled benefits, which will still be worth more than what seniors receive today. This is part of a long pattern of the administration suggesting that future retirees will not receive benefits by saying the system will be “flat bust,” “broke,” “bankrupt,” and so forth (also see this post). It’s nonsense.