Brendan Nyhan

Mark Blumenthal of Pollster.com (where I frequently cross-post) has a new NationalJournal.com column discussing my claim that myths about health care reform are unlikely to be dispelled by November. Here’s how it begins:

Last week, Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh said Democrats are betting that perceptions of the health care reform bill will improve once it is enacted. “That is the bet,” Bayh told Charlie Rose, “that some of the misconceptions out there will be proven to be false between now and the election.”

That’s likely a “bad bet,” as University of Michigan political scientist Brendan Nyhan wrote on Wednesday.

The column also includes discussion of my research on correcting misperceptions with Jason Reifler. Read the whole thing!

Via Matthew Yglesias, Thomas Mann, Norm Ornstein, and Raffaela Wakeman have a new op-ed and infographic on reconciliation that nicely complements their TNR piece on the procedure and the Sunlight Foundation’s infographic:

Bill Frist, a former Senate majority leader, called reconciliation an “arcane” procedure that Congress has “never used … to adopt major, substantive policy change.” Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee asserted that this parliamentary tactic was unprecedented for a bill like health reform. Senator John McCain of Arizona said that the use of reconciliation would have “cataclysmic effects.”

So, would reconciliation represent an anomalous and dangerous power grab? The accompanying chart, which lists 15 major reconciliation bills passed by Congress since the process was first used in 1980, provides evidence for assessing that charge.

Reconciliation was intended to be a narrow procedure to bring revenues and spending into conformity with the levels set in the annual budget resolution. But it quickly became much more. The 22 reconciliation bills so far passed by Congress (three of which were vetoed by President Bill Clinton) have included all manner of budgetary and policy measures: deficit reductions and increases; social policy bills like welfare reform; major changes in Medicare and Medicaid; large tax cuts; and small adjustments in existing law. Neither party has been shy about using this process to avoid dilatory tactics in the Senate; Republicans have in fact been more willing to do so than Democrats.

Here’s a version of the infographic that’s cropped to fit on the blog – click here for the full version:

From my Twitter feed:
-Today’s New York Times story on David Axelrod features the standard tropes of the blame-the-staff genre of political news

–Bush nostalgia begins even as downturn that started during his presidency continues
-Steve Smith, a Congressional expert at Washington University in St. Louis, has a new paper on procedural conflict in the Senate
-Newsweek’s Andrew Romano does some fact-checking on GOP claims about reconciliation
-A Republican ad in Nevada criticizes health care reform for “weaken[ing] Medicare”, adds “government-run health care is wrong”
-Tom Friedman is one horrible columnist
–Political science experiment counters simplistic bias claims: “newspapers expressed more interest in pro-McCain letters than pro-Obama”

-Evan Bayh says “[Democrats] are betting the myths will be dispelled” on health care — that’s a bad bet
–Least dignified Congressional press release ever?

The quantitative masterminds at the Wall Street Journal editorial board are at it again.

Back in 2007, I showed how they cooked up a bogus graphic purporting to demonstrate that “Lower corporate tax rates with fewer loopholes can lead to more, not less, tax revenue from business”:

Today, the Journal denounces the 2007 law that has increased the minimum wage over the last three years, writing, “Rarely has a law hurt more vulnerable people more quickly.” To support this claim, it provides the following analysis:

The nearby chart compares the three-stage increase in the minimum wage with the jobless rate for teens age 16 to 19 since 2007. The first increase, to $5.85 from $5.15, came after a decade of no increases and when the overall jobless rate was below 5% and the teen rate was 14.9%. The demand for labor was sufficiently strong in many areas that most employers were probably willing to absorb the higher wage.

But as the minimum wage increased even as the overall job market began to worsen, the damage to teen job seekers became more severe. By the time the third increase to $7.25 from $6.55 took effect in July 2009, the teen jobless rate was 24.3%, and by October it peaked at 27.6% before dropping to 26.4% in January.

The story is even worse for black teens, who often have lower than average education levels or live in areas with fewer job prospects. Their jobless rate climbed from 38.5% before the third wage hike to 49.8% in November 2009, before falling back to 43.8% in January. For black male teens, the rate climbed to 52.2% in December from 39.2% in July. The difference between the jobless rates for black teens and the entire population widened by six percentage points from June 2007 to January 2010. Even assuming those rates fall as the job market improves this year, they will remain destructively high.

While it’s certainly plausible that the increases in the minimum wage over the last three years have worsened teen unemployment, correlation doesn’t prove causation. Any variable that trended in one direction during the current economic downturn will be correlated with the unemployment rate among teens or any other group.

More importantly, unemployment is rising across the board, which cuts against the WSJ’s hypothesis that the minimum wage is having a particularly devastating effect on teens. To illustrate the point, here is a replication of the Journal’s graphic with a line added to indicate the general unemployment rate (i.e. among everyone 16 and over) — the lines are essentially parallel (correlations of .86-.97):

In fact, the seemingly dramatic increases in the unemployment rate among teens and black teens noted by the Journal (while disturbing) are actually smaller relative to the initial rates in those groups than among adults generally. To see this more clearly, I’ve plotted the data as a proportion of the unemployment rate in January 2007:

Finally, the sample size is very small, but a preliminary examination shows no obvious statistical evidence of a relationship between the minimum wage and the teen or black teen unemployment rates once we account for the upward trend in joblessness.

In short, the Journal could be right, but we can’t tell from their analysis, which is below Econ 101 standards. It will take a far more systematic examination of the data to know what effect the minimum wage increases have had.

Update 3/5 2:42 PM: TNR’s Jon Chait links with amusing comments.

Updating my previous posts on the history of reconciliation, here is a Sunlight Foundation infographic that is by far the most usable to date (via Matthew Yglesias) — click the image for a larger version:

If you want to get wonky, Ezra Klein has posted the most recent Congressional Research Service report on the use of reconciliation here.

Politico’s Ben Smith obtained an internal fundraising presentation explaining the current fundraising tactics of the RNC:

The presentation was delivered by RNC Finance Director Rob Bickhart to top donors and fundraisers at a party retreat in Boca Grande, Florida on February 18, a source at the gathering said.

The presentation explains the Republican fundraising in simple terms.

“What can you sell when you do not have the White House, the House, or the Senate…?” it asks.

The answer: “Save the country from trending toward Socialism!”

Here are the visuals:

Classy!

Nate Silver has written a post arguing that comparisons between Obama, FDR, and LBJ are unfair because FDR and LBJ had larger Congressional majorities when they passed their major legislative accomplishments:

When F.D.R. took over the Presidency in 1933, the Democrats controlled 64 percent of the Senate seats and 73 percent (!) of the House seats, counting independents who were sympathetic to the party. And those numbers only increased over the next couple of midterms — during their peak during 1937-38, the Demorats actually controlled about 80 percent (!) of the seats in both chambers. Obama, by contrast, came into his term with 59 percent majorities in both chambers. That’s not much to complain about by the standards of recent Presidencies, but is nevertheless a long way from where F.D.R. stood during his first two terms, or for that matter where L.B.J.’s numbers were during the 1965-66 period, when the bulk of the Great Society programs were implemented.

F.D.R. and L.B.J. might have been great cleanup hitters — and you’ll get no argument from me that Obama’s aptitude at shepherding his agenda through Congress has been mixed, at best. But they basically spent the first several years of their Presidencies playing in the Congressional equivalent of Coors Field.

However, Silver neglects the differences in the composition of the Democratic Party in Congress between the three presidencies. The current Democratic caucus is more liberal and less ideologically diverse than the ones which passed FDR and LBJ’s legislation. To illustrate, here are plots of the estimated ideological distributions by party ranging from liberal to conservative for the 73rd (1933-1934), 89th (1965-1966), and 111th Congress (2009)*:

In particular, LBJ faced a widening split between Southern and Northern Democrats on both core economic issues as well as civil rights (an issue that split both parties internally at the time). He and FDR did have two major advantages relative to Obama — more moderate Republicans and fewer filibusters — but it’s not obvious they were playing at Coors Field.

* Technical note: These are kernel density plots of first dimension estimated ideal points from Common Space DW-NOMINATE. I’ve suppressed the scale on the y-axis for aesthetic reasons.

I’m almost always disappointed in Charles M. Blow’s “visual op-ed” column in the New York Times, which typically marries a simplistic premise to a lousy bar chart. But Saturday’s column was even worse than usual.

Blow wrote a whole column based on the premise that Mo’Nique is likely to win an Oscar for her role as a “an abusive, crack-addicted mother” in “Precious,” which Blow called “another step in the seeming campaign to resurrect the increasingly passé image of the crack-addled black mother”:

Mo’Nique is a favorite to win an Oscar next Sunday for her powerful and disturbing portrayal of an abusive, crack-addicted mother in the movie “Precious.”

If she wins, I will silently grit my teeth — not because she’s undeserving, but because it represents another step in the seeming campaign to resurrect the increasingly passé image of the crack-addled black mother.

This critique was paired with a chart comparing crack addiction by race and gender.

There was only one problem — Mo’Nique’s character didn’t use crack (did Blow see the movie?). In other words, Blow himself was the one resurrecting “the increasingly passé image of the crack-addled black mother.” Here’s the online version of the correction that ran in today’s Times:

The column by Charles M. Blow on Saturday, about race and crack addiction, incorrectly described a character in the movie “Precious.” The abusive mother portrayed by Mo’Nique is not a crack addict.

With his premise destroyed, Blow simply changed his argument, now arguing that it’s “heartening” to see that Mo’Nique’s character wasn’t a crack addict:

Mo’Nique is a favorite to win an Oscar next Sunday for her powerful and disturbing portrayal of an abusive mother in the movie “Precious.”

If she wins, I may grit my teeth at the depraved depiction, but at least her character is merely juxtaposed with the crack scourge and isn’t in fact an addict. That’s heartening since the crack-addicted black mother has recently made a curious comeback.

There was a time when this character was more relevant: in the 1980s and 1990s when the crack epidemic plunged whole communities into violence, fear and chaos. (To be fair, “Precious” is set in the 1980s.) But this character now feels like a refugee of time — and discordant with the facts on the ground.

From my Twitter feed:
–Previous votes on reconciliation by Senate Republicans
-Media Matters catches the Washington Post repeating the “death panel” myth without debunking it
-Ignore the latest edition of the useless Natl. Journal rankings — see my previous posts here,
here, and
here
–Via Michael Crowley, US training of Afghan legal officials includes showing them scenes from “My Cousin Vinny” — I expect an APB for “two utes” from Kabul any day now
-Via Henry Farrell, a pie chart you’re unlikely to see in USA Today any time soon
–Dispatches from the world’s greatest deliberative body: “[Senator] Bunning … shot the middle finger over his head”
-Birtherism as a factual wedge issue within the GOP

As predicted, Clive Crook is blaming Obama for his political problems (rather than his staff as in the meme from a few weeks ago) without mentioning the fact that any president would struggle in the current economic and political context. Expect more of this if health care doesn’t pass and/or as the Democrats’ midterm polling numbers become worse.

PS: Crook also trots out a silly up-is-down comparison that is quickly becoming a cliché among centrist and center-right pundits:

The best hope for the Obama presidency may be the drubbing for Democrats in November that looks increasingly likely. Just as for Bill Clinton in 1994, this would make the president’s mind up for him. With weakened allies in Congress, he would have to be a centrist president or an outright failure.

Bill Clinton’s much-vaunted move to the center may have helped boost his margin in 1996, but improvements in the state of the economy surely played a more important role in the outcome. The “best hope for the Obama presidency” isn’t a “drubbing for Democrats in November”; it’s a period of sustained economic growth that will boost Obama’s approval numbers and increase the likelihood that he’ll be re-elected in 2012.

Update 3/2 11:19 AM: This Washington Post profile of Rahm Emanuel reverses the previous blame-the-staff meme, instead suggesting that “Emanuel… could have helped the administration avoid its current bind if the president had heeded his advice.”