Brendan Nyhan

In a story on the Washington Post website, William Branigin manages the rare feat of casting appropriate doubt on the President’s misleading tax and budget claims:

Democrats have long derided Bush’s deficit-cutting boasts, saying he routinely ignores the huge debt that the federal government has accumulated since he was inaugurated in January 2001. From a record surplus of $237 billion in fiscal 2000 under President Bill Clinton, the budget began slipping into deficit under Bush, in part because of a sluggish economy, falling tax revenue, the impact of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the war in Iraq.

But after reaching a record $413 billion in 2004, the budget deficit dropped to $248 billion in the 2006 fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, thanks largely to higher tax receipts from corporations and individuals.

The claim that the federal budget deficit has been cut in half stems from the administration’s original projection of a $512 billion deficit for 2004, a number that critics have said was inflated, especially since the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) was forecasting $477 billion at the time.

Some economists also have charged that Bush has claimed unwarranted credit for his tax cuts, which they say have cost the Treasury more in lost revenue than has been gained from their economic stimulus effect.

According to Alan D. Viard, a former Bush White House economist who joined the American Enterprise Institute, “Federal revenue is lower today than it would have been without the tax cuts. There’s really no dispute among economists about that.”

Viard said in October there was “no evidence” that Bush’s tax cuts come anywhere close to paying for themselves, a conclusion shared by economists at the Treasury Department and the nonpartisan CBO, Washington Post staff writer Lori Montgomery reported.

The Congressional Research Service has estimated that economic growth fueled by the tax cuts is likely to generate revenue worth about 7 percent of their total cost, which amounts to about $1.1 trillion since 2001.

PS Add Viard to the list of current and former Bush administration economists who have stated that his tax cuts have not increased revenue.

Update 1/4 8:17 AM: Where’d it go? Brad DeLong points out that the link which once led to Branigin’s article now points to a Peter Baker article that ran on page A1 of today’s paper — and omits all of the content quoted above:

But, alas, the act of journamalism was only temporary. If you click on Brendan’s link or search the Post’s website, you find that the story is gone. It has been replaced: journalism to journamalism. Somebody decided the Post’s readers needed to be protected from learning about the estimates of CBO, about the consensus of economists, and about the fact that the Bushies highballed their forecast to make it easier to cut it in half.

Now we see a different story–with no quotes from real economists, with no quotes from budget analysts outside the Heritage Foundation, with un-fact-checked quotes from Bush’s budget director, and with no challenge to Bush’s claim that the tax cuts have raised revenue–by the obsequious Peter Baker.

Branigin’s article has apparently been completely disappeared — it shows up in the Post search engine, but the links lead to Baker’s article.

The AP highlights another passage from President Bush’s Wall Street Journal op-ed today:

President Bush, facing a Democratic-controlled Congress for the first time, is urging lawmakers to work with his administration and warning that “political statements” in the form of legislation would result in a stalemate.

Bush, of course, has never pushed legislation with no chance of passage as a political statement. Oh, wait…

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed today, President Bush falsely suggests that his tax cuts have increased federal revenue yet again:

It is also a fact that our tax cuts have fueled robust economic growth and record revenues. Because revenues have grown and we’ve done a better job of holding the line on domestic spending, we met our goal of cutting the deficit in half three years ahead of schedule. By continuing these policies, we can balance the federal budget by 2012 while funding our priorities and making the tax cuts permanent. In early February, I will submit a budget that does exactly that. The bottom line is tax relief and spending restraint are good for the American worker, good for the American taxpayer, and good for the federal budget. Now is not the time to raise taxes on the American people.

By balancing the budget through pro-growth economic policies and spending restraint, we are better positioned to tackle the longer term fiscal challenge facing our country: reforming entitlements–Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid–so future generations can benefit from these vital programs without bankrupting our country.

But as I’ve pointed out over and over since 2001, Bush’s suggestion is false. Indeed, his own economists have repeatedly admitted that tax cuts do not increase revenue. It’s a sad commentary on the nation’s press corps that this falsehood so often goes unchallenged.

A New York Observer article on the future of the public editor position at the New York Times includes

Mr. [Daniel] Okrent [the previous public editor] was a sharp critic who raised hackles and then won respect during his 18-month term. In contrast, Mr. Calame has been a bit more like that other Barney, the friendly purple dinosaur—and not entirely unlike Snuffleupagus, the once-invisible creature of Sesame Street. The readers were Big Bird, and we could see and hear him—but did he exist to anyone inside The Times?

The lefty cartoonist and columnist Ted Rall called me a “Bush apologist” back in 2002 for debunking his conspiracy theories about the war in Afghanistan. Now he’s claiming he was right all along in a diatribe where he absurdly labels me a “neoconservative Republican”:

Now that only 9% of Americans believe the war in Iraq can be won, it’s easy to forget how bad things got for those of us who were against it from the beginning. As the Great Northern Plains blog reminds us, those of us who stood up against this idiotic war against Iraq were getting trashed by the radical right while the moderates and liberals quivered in fearful silence. Paul Krugman referenced this typical Weekly Standard piece in his normally excellent New York Times column, but fumbled by focussing on elected officials trashed by the radical right rather than on the journalists and other citizens who actually paid a price for being correct.

Here’s the section about Yours Truly:

Did you know that your average Iraqi fellow would much rather watch his relatives be raped or eaten by dogs than have to shake hands with an American Marine on the sidewalk?

“Regardless of their political affiliations, patriotic Iraqis prefer to bear the yoke of Saddam’s brutal and corrupt dictatorship than to suffer the humiliation of living in a conquered nation. . . . The thought of infidel troops marching through their cities, past their mosques, patting them down, ordering them around, disgusts them even more than Saddam’s torture chambers.”

–Cartoonist and conspiracy-theory book author Ted Rall, April 2, 2003

I assume that the “conspiracy theory” book they’re referring to was GAS WAR, which detailed the development of the Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline project, a project neoconservative Republicans like Brendan Nyhan said was pure fiction. Now, of course, the pipeline is under construction even as Afghanistan collapses into worse chaos. As for my quote, well, looks like I called that one right. As usual.

Now that my politics have been vindicated, will the publications that censored my cartoons because of my politics between 2001 and 2005 apologize to their readers and pick them back up again? Don’t hold your breath. After all, being the Week In Review editor of the New York Times means never having to say you’re sorry.

Rall is unfortunately not a member of the reality-based community. For the record, I never claimed that the Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline project “was pure fiction.” In fact, I pointed out that Pakistan had “recently lobbied the new US ambassador to the country on behalf of the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan pipeline” and specifically acknowledged that “President Bush and Vice President Cheney, as former oilmen, certainly understand the importance of the pipeline projects, but these are surely only part of a complex set of factors being weighed by the administration.” Rall, on the other hand, has not seen this ludicrous conspiracy theory vindicated:

Finally the Bushies had the perfect excuse to do what the U.S. had wanted all along: invade and/or install an old-school puppet regime in Kabul. Realpolitik no more cares about the 6,000 dead than it concerns itself with oppressed women in Afghanistan; this ersatz war by a phony president is solely about getting the Unocal deal done without interference from annoying local middlemen.

Needless to say, the fact that a pipeline project is underway hardly proves that it was the sole motivation for the war. (See my original column for more.)

After my experience with The American Prospect, I’m sympathetic to Spencer Ackerman, who was fired by The New Republic after coming into conflict with TNR’s maddening pro-Iraq war politics. (Unfortunately, he signed on with TAP afterward, which is far more dogmatic than TNR.)

But Ackerman takes his newfound freedom from editorial constraint too far in an unhinged post on his new personal blog:

Read the names of the dead below. Ask yourself if a cynical show trial was worth the life of a single one of them.

Bush said, with no evident awareness:

Today, Saddam Hussein was executed after receiving a fair trial — the kind of justice he denied the victims of his brutal regime.

Fair trials were unimaginable under Saddam Hussein’s tyrannical rule. It is a testament to the Iraqi people’s resolve to move forward after decades of oppression that, despite his terrible crimes against his own people, Saddam Hussein received a fair trial. This would not have been possible without the Iraqi people’s determination to create a society governed by the rule of law.

Bush is a torturer, so he wouldn’t recognize a fair trial if he observed one. (I surely hope Baltasar Garzon will one day instruct him in what a fair trial looks like.) As Al Gore once observed, he dragged the name of the United States through Saddam Hussein’s torture prison. The idea that Bush’s hypocrisy and deception could force one to divert attention from the death of Saddam is a disgusting thing, but yet the coward who decrees an outcome and calls it justice demands condemnation. Perhaps the right thing to say is: One down, one to go.

However flawed the Iraqi legal process may have been, there’s just no justification for the last line “One down, one to go,” which implicitly compares Bush to Saddam and could be read to suggest that Bush should be executed next.

Update 1/2 7:03 AM: To clarify, the issue of why Ackerman was fired is complicated; see the New York Observer piece I linked above for more. I’m specifically sympathetic to Ackerman’s claim to have been constrained in his writing and reporting by his disagreement with the magazine over the war. I don’t condone his other (alleged) transgressions.

Peggy Noonan captures the dynamic of the posthumous praise of Gerald Ford pretty well in this passage:

It is not clear who will speak at his funeral, but it is now unfortunately common practice for politicians to see every eulogy as an opportunity. Invited to reflect on biography, they tend to smuggle in as much autobiography as they can, and advance their personal agendas. If Bill Clinton speaks, one suspects he will laud Ford’s personal tolerance. The text: This was a man who did not judge others. The subtext: He wouldn’t have voted to impeach me! If George W. Bush speaks he will likely laud Ford as an exemplar of the old bipartisanship. In this way he will attempt to confer the bipartisan mantle on himself.

In this case, though, Bush patted himself on the back by praising Ford as a man who made tough decisions that were sometimes unpopular (via Josh Marshall):

He always put the needs of his country before his own, and did what he thought was right, even when those decisions were unpopular. Only years later would Americans come to fully appreciate the foresight and wisdom of this good man.

Noonan was closer in her prediction for Bill Clinton, who made a remark to Newsweek praising Ford for his “healing decisions” and not being “caught up in the moment”:

At the Congressional Gold Medal ceremony, I was able to say something publicly about Ford that needed to be said by a Democratic president: “When you made your healing decisions … it was easy for us to criticize you, because we were caught up in the moment. You didn’t get caught up in the moment, and you were right.”

I’m skeptical of simplistic theories of liberal media bias. It’s true that coverage of social conservatives is often unfair or condescending. However, it’s also true that elite news reporters skew conservative on economic issues. Similarly, I think journalists’ devotion to the cult of objectivity and focus on coverage of personalities and politics instead of substance are more damaging to our democracy than any ideological biases.

That said, there’s no denying that the New York Times has a problem with its coverage of conservatives, which has been limited in scope and often sneering or uncomprehending in tone. The problem is bad enough that the paper created a conservative beat in January 2004.

Still, there’s obviously more work to be done in changing the culture of the paper. Today’s edition features a long and generally favorable profile of Patricia Heaton, the Christian conservative who starred on “Everybody Loves Raymond” and recently became enmeshed in the controversy over a Missouri ballot initiative to promote stem cell research. In praising Heaton, however, the Times writer Jesse Green derides other conservatives by referring to “her un-wingnutlike desire for conciliation”:

It isn’t so much her views that cause her trouble as her unwillingness to finesse them for public consumption. She is compulsively honest, though she feels that’s not so much a virtue as “an illness, like Tourette’s.” Even her more extreme positions are stated without hedging: If it were up to her, she said, there would be no abortion for any reason. But she offers such thoughts with a sense of helplessness, as if she were trapped by the implications of her core principles.

And then there is her un-wingnutlike desire for conciliation. As soon as she realized what had happened, she sent Mr. [Michael J.] Fox a message saying that she was sorry and that she prayed for his recovery. He responded graciously (the amendment passed with 51 percent of the vote) and later said, “If we can have a healthy dialogue about issues that people see differently, that’s marvelous.”

Would the Times use a term like that in reference to liberals? I doubt it.

Writing in the New York Times, guest columnist Orlando Patterson (a Harvard sociologist) claims without much justification that Colin Powell “stood a good chance of winning the presidency on the Republican ticket had he run”:

A black man has led the world’s most powerful military machine and stood a good chance of winning the presidency on the Republican ticket had he run; another is now a leading challenger for the Democratic nomination.

But what are the odds that Powell would have won the Republican nomination in 1996? He was pro-choice and pro-affirmative action, which are not exactly winning positions in the GOP primaries. Even if he had a good chance in the general election (which he probably didn’t given the state of the economy at that time), the joint probability of him winning both the nomination and the general election was very low.

In the wake of the ethics charges filed by the North Carolina State Bar, the North Carolina Conference of District Attorneys is calling for Durham DA Mike Nifong to give up control of the Duke lacrosse case:

The group, which represents district attorneys from across North Carolina, said in a statement that “it is in the interest of justice and the effective administration of criminal justice that Mr. Nifong immediately withdraw and recuse himself from the prosecution.”

…The district attorney group also called for the case to be reassigned and handed over to “another prosecutorial authority.”

How long will Nifong be able to take the heat?