Brendan Nyhan

Defending tax cuts the House passed yesterday, David Drier spouted the standard falsehood of supply-siders everywhere:

“By cutting taxes, you grow the economy, and you generate an enhanced flow of revenues to the Treasury,” said Rep. David Dreier (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Rules Committee.

Revenue is not enhanced by tax cuts; it is reduced in almost all circumstances. Ask Bush’s economists.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal editorial page attributes most of the recovery to President Bush’s 2003 tax cut, while trying to imply it increased revenue:

Oh, and yes, there was a $120 billion reduction in the budget deficit in 2005. That’s because tax receipts rose by more than in any previous year in U.S. history, even adjusting for inflation. Receipts were up by $55 billion above projections in 2004; $122 billion above projections in 2005; and are already running well ahead of projections so far in fiscal 2006 (which began in October).

But again, the Journal is trying to mislead you. The fact that the legislation lost less revenue than projected is being used to (falsely) suggest that it actually increased revenue.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — never trust the WSJ editorial page.

Update 12/8: Via Brad DeLong, Daniel Gross has more on problems with the WSJ editorial.

Update 12/9: Via reader DJ Ninja in comments, here’s Rep. Jeb Hensarling pushing the same supply-side nonsense:

“Clearly, tax relief is part of the deficit solution, not part of the problem,” said Representative Jeb Hensarling, Republican of Texas and one of the mavericks. “More economic growth and more jobs means more tax revenue flowing into the federal Treasury. Tax revenues are up close to 15 percent, the highest level in U.S. history, and the budget deficit has shrunk by more than $100 billion.”

Dick Cheney can’t resist linking 9/11 and Iraq, no matter how nonsensical the claim:

Some have suggested that by liberating Iraq from Saddam Hussein, we
simply stirred up a hornet’s nest. They overlook a fundamental fact:
We were not in Iraq on September 11th, 2001, and the terrorists hit us
anyway.

Here’s Holly Martins at Wonkette trying to understand the reasoning behind this statement:

Wah-huh? So let’s get this straight: If you suggest any policy in Iraq other that the administration-approved “Stay the Course” you are handing a nation over to terrorist control. But if terrorist activity, or the threat thereof, seems sufficiently worrisome to contemplate another policy then. . .it doesn’t matter, because the terrorists will attack us anyway? Withdrawal from Iraq is appeasing the terrorist enemy–but 9/11 demonstrates the mindset of that enemy is irrelevant. Wouldn’t the logic of the latter claim suggest that the terrorists simply might not notice we had withdrawn and/or attack us no matter what? Are they all-powerful evildoers, or Ritalin- deprived ADD cases? Also: There were all sorts of things we weren’t doing in 2001. We hadn’t yet thrilled to the magic of Gigli, or whatever the name of that sucky Coldplay record is. Does this mean if there’s no Gigli sequel, the terrorists win? Please make our head stop hurting like this, Mr. Vice President, Sir!

Richard Cohen puts it even more simply:

Yes, and the crowing of the rooster makes the sun come up. Cause and effect is being mocked here.

Ah, the twists and turns of the changing party line. Remember, up means up … until it means down.

When President Bush nominated Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, he repeatedly described her as a conservative. During his October 8 radio address, for instance, he said, “Harriet Miers will be
the type of judge I said I would nominate: a good conservative judge.” Even when he withdrew her nomination, he reiterated this point, stating, “I nominated Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court because of her
extraordinary legal experience, her character, and her conservative
judicial philosophy.”

So why should we give any credence to this?

The Bush administration is mounting an aggressive effort to counter a Knight Ridder story that described Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito as a committed judicial conservative.

The administration’s response – delivered separately Tuesday by the White House and the Justice Department – reflects its determination to defend Alito and its sensitivity to the “conservative” label for him.

There are only two possibilities. Either President Bush is breaking his promise to nominate conservatives to the federal bench, or Samuel Alito is a conservative. Only one can be true.

In a political sense, Howard Dean chose his words poorly when he said that “The idea that we’re going to win this war is an idea that unfortunately is just plain wrong.” But this is a gaffe in the Kinsley sense — when a politician tells the truth. It’s virtually indisputable that
“winning” the war in Iraq is highly unlikely. The only remaining question is whether the US can pull out without sparking full-blown civil war or giving rise to a dangerous Islamic theocracy.

In any case, Dean has every right to speak his mind, and saying he believes that the war is unwinnable does not mean he wants us to lose. Consider the absurdity of this logic: It’s also true that I don’t think we can kill Osama Bin Laden with a death ray from outer space, but that doesn’t mean I oppose taking him out.

Unfortunately, several Republicans and media commentators have continued their long pattern of post-9/11 attacks on dissent. The Los Angeles Times reports that House Speaker Dennis Hastert said Dean “made it clear the Democratic Party sides with those who wish to surrender” and GOP chairman Ken Mehlman said Dean’s statement “sends the wrong message to our troops, the wrong message to the enemy, the wrong message to the Iraqi people.”

A New York Post editorial was even uglier (lowlights in bold):

Not all the surrender monkeys live in France.

Take Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean — the sedition-mongering former governor of Vermont who once presumed to the presidency and who now is working overtime for a terrorist victory in Iraq.

…”[The] idea that we’re going to win the war in Iraq is an idea which is just plain wrong,” he said Monday. “Bring the 80,000 National Guard and Reserve troops home immediately. They don’t belong in a conflict like this anyway.”

Dean doesn’t know what he’s talking about, on several levels.

The National Guard and Reserves have been an integral part of the Army’s “total force” for a generation — there’s no bringing them home without collapsing the entire effort in Iraq.

Such an outcome, of course, would be much to Dr. Dean’s liking — because, again, it “is just plain wrong” to think “we’re going to win the war in Iraq.”

…For what Dean did was send an unambiguous message of encouragement to America’s mortal enemies both in Iraq and elsewhere around the world.

Hang tough, Dean was telling al Qaeda: You may not be able to defeat the U.S. Army and Marine Corps, but we’re doing your work for you right here at home.

A reminder to the demagogues: George W. Bush said “I don’t think you can win [the war on terror]” in 2004. Did he “send the wrong signal” to our troops or “the enemy”? Does that mean he wants us to lose the war on terror? Of course not. It was a candid empirical judgment about the likelihood of “winning” a non-traditional military conflict. But for conservatives eager to blunt growing opposition to the war, it’s easier to bludgeon Dean than to consider this obvious double standard.

Update 12/8: This post was picked up by Slate’s Today’s Blogs feature.

Update 12/8: You read it here first. John B. Judis, writing on TNR Online today, delivers virtually the same line I used above: “Dean’s statements perfectly fit Michael Kinsley’s definition of a ‘gaffe’–an assertion that is impolitic but true.”

Last week, the Treasury Department released this fine piece of agitprop:

Tapped’s Ezra Klein wonders what was going on in the missing period that the graph omits, and points out that it implies Bush’s 2003 tax cut turned the economy around in a matter of months:

Maybe others can decode this bit of Treasury Department propaganda better than I, but it seems, contra its own billing, to show that the first three years of George W. Bush’s were really, really bad, not that his fourth year was really good. After all, the 2003 tax cut the graph trumpets appears to heal the economy in under a month, but Bush was elected three years earlier — so what was he doing during the interim? Playing Boggle?

Meanwhile, Columbia statistician Andrew Gelman was moved to invoke Orwell in a denunciation of the chart as misleading and poorly constructed:

The graph is so ugly I put it below the fold.

Anyway, it got me to thinking about a famous point that Orwell made, that one reason that propaganda is often poorly written is that the propagandist wants to give a particular impression while being vague on the details.

In that spirit, I’d like to offer a quick corrective. Here’s a simple graph of the jobs data since Bush took office, which shows that the Treasury chart begins just before the low point of Bush’s tenure:

Likewise for the unemployment rate, which peaked in mid-2003:

And here’s the long-term historical path of the unemployment rate by presidential administration:

It is true, of course, that presidents have less direct influence over the economy than the public believes, so don’t be misled by my labeling, which is intended as a rejoinder to the Treasury graph. On the other hand, however, Princeton’s Larry Bartels has demonstrated that Democratic presidents have consistently produced greater GDP growth, lower unemployment, and lower inequality than Republican presidents (without producing much more inflation) since World War II. This finding suggests that pundits like Matthew Yglesias shouldn’t be so quick to shift blame away from President Bush for the lackluster labor market, which Kevin Drum also attributes to Republican labor market policies. Contrary to Treasury’s propaganda, the labor market has been relatively slack under President Bush, and his failure to deliver across-the-board employment and income gains appears to be part of a long-term historical pattern.

In his excellent Atlantic Monthly article on building an Iraqi army, James Fallows busts some administration spin about the extent of the violence there:

The first major attack on Iraq’s own policemen occurred in October of 2003, when a car bomb killed ten people at a Baghdad police station. This summer an average of ten Iraqi policemen or soldiers were killed each day. It is true, as U.S. officials often point out, that the violence is confined mainly to four of Iraq’s eighteen provinces. But these four provinces contain the nation’s capital and just under half its people.

To illustrate the absurdity of this point, which the White House and Defense Department use frequently, imagine if there were a rebellion in the US and the government said, well, 41 out of 50 states are safe, and the unsafe states were California, Florida, Illinois, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Michigan, and Massachusetts, plus the District of Columbia. That’s roughly half the US population and the nation’s capital.

In an email attacking Dick Cheney’s fundraising on behalf of Tom DeLay (PDF), Tom Hughes of Democracy for America takes peas in a pod metaphors to a whole new level:

Is this a momentary lapse in Cheney’s judgment? Not a chance. Right now, his ex-chief of staff faces spending the rest of his life in jail on perjury charges. So Cheney riding to the rescue of Tom DeLay arrives as no surprise. The two are peas in the same, ethically challenged pod.

As John Stewart would say — whaa?

Here’s a press release that makes me cringe — talk about a lowbrow publicity stunt:

The National Center for Public Policy Research is handing out “emissions credits” printed on toilet paper at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Montreal today, to symbolize the failure of the Kyoto Protocol and the futility of emissions trading schemes.

Under the European Union’s “CO2 Emissions Trading Scheme,” companies are allotted credits that allow them to emit a fixed amount of carbon dioxide. Companies that reduce their carbon dioxide output, and thus don’t use all of their credits, can sell them to companies who are exceeding their C02 allotments.

As the flawed Kyoto treaty is all but dead, emissions credits aren’t likely to be of any value in the future.

“Emissions credits aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on,” said David Ridenour, Vice President of The National Center, “Unless, of course, that paper happens to be toilet paper.”

Classy stuff. Here’s a picture:

The news that New Mexico governor Bill Richardson hadn’t been selected in the baseball draft as he had claimed will probably spell doom for his presidential hopes. It fits too perfectly with the lying politician stereotype, although his share price hasn’t completely bottomed out on the Tradesports futures market:

It will soon, though. Tom Ruprecht starts putting in the coffin in the New York Times:

Mr. Richardson said that “after being notified of the situation and after researching the matter” he had come “to the conclusion that I was not drafted by the A’s.” – The Associated Press, Nov. 25

YES, Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico had to embark on an exhaustive fact-finding mission to determine whether or not he was ever a major-league baseball player. (And we wonder why nothing gets done in government.)

But in Mr. Richardson’s defense, we’ve all been there. I can’t tell you the number of times I had to stop what I was doing and ask myself: “Wait, am I on the Cleveland Indians? Do I have a game this evening?” One night last summer, I recall watching a Colorado Rockies game and staring at the pitcher for several minutes, wondering, “Is that me?”

An unnamed Bush adviser tries to spin the administration’s poll numbers by telling the Washington Post that things will turn around because public believes the President is “a person of honesty and integrity”:

One White House official, who was willing to talk candidly about internal strategy only without being identified by name, acknowledged that “those numbers are troubling” in recent polls, but expressed confidence that they will recover because the public fundamentally regards Bush as “a person of honesty and integrity.”

The ugly facts:

Newsweek Poll conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International. Nov. 10-11, 2005. N=1,002 adults nationwide. MoE ± 3.

“Do you think the phrase ‘is honest and ethical’ describes George W. Bush, or not?”

-Describes 42%
-Does not 50%
-Unsure 8%