Brendan Nyhan

Very cool:

January 29, 2005

Grim news from the health care front:

Pointing to rising health costs and the oversized proportion of insurance claims attributed to smokers, some employers in California and around the country are refusing to hire applicants who smoke and, sometimes, firing employees who refuse to quit.

“Employers are realizing the majority of health costs are spent on a small minority of workers,” says Bill Whitmer, chief executive of the Health Enhancement Research Organization, an employer and healthcare coalition in Birmingham, Ala.

Federal and state laws bar employers from turning down applicants or firing workers based on race, religion or gender. Some states have enacted laws offering similar protections for smokers. But experts say workers in nearly half the states, including California, have few legal options if employers decide to prohibit them from smoking outside the workplace.

Today, it’s smoking, but tomorrow it could be obesity or 100 other conditions or behaviors — and employers may not even wait to find strong supporting evidence before acting:

Though some studies have shown that smokers have higher absentee and lower productivity rates than nonsmokers, economists say the research is limited. It’s possible, they say, that smokers don’t dramatically increase health costs with chronic and expensive conditions like emphysema, heart disease and cancer until they’re much older, when they may be employed elsewhere or retired.

This is a classic slippery slope problem. As the Times put it:

Critics are concerned that if more companies follow suit, it will lead to other employer intrusions on workers’ lives. What is to stop companies from telling workers they can’t ride motorcycles? Or eat junk food?

We’re finally coming face-to-face with a deep tension in public policy. On the one hand, the dynamism of the US economy depends in part on the freedom of companies to hire and fire nearly at will, a drastic difference from regulations in place in Europe. But we depend on private employers to pick up the tab for health care for the bulk of our population. For a long time, they were generous in covering their workers (see, for instance, General Motors 1945-1970). And even as many employers have cut back or dropped coverage as costs have risen over the last twenty years, it has almost always been at the firm level. But refusing to hire or even firing workers for smoking could be a sign of a much more fundamental problem. If employers start discriminating based on behaviors (smoking, overeating) or pre-existing conditions (obesity, diabetes, previous incidents of cancer), it could very quickly break the risk-pooling function of health insurance; make it harder for non-healthy people to get jobs and coverage; and push more people with high medical costs into Medicaid. If only the healthiest people get covered, the private health insurance system in this country will essentially be destroyed.

What’s the solution? I don’t know. We should be careful before dumping more regulations onto companies, but it seems that the question of employer discrimination based on actual or anticipated health care costs needs a closer look. That’s a starting point, a least. There are much bigger questions here about fixing the system at a more fundamental level, but I’ll leave them for another day.

In the course of doing some political science research, I discovered a disturbing fact: Robert Scheer, hack LA Times columnist, once ran for the US Senate in California. Way back in 1970, when he was waaaay out there on the left (far more so than now), he was the candidate for the Peace and Freedom Party. Shockingly enough, he didn’t get too many votes. In fact, his vote total was so low that the Congressional Quarterly database I’m using doesn’t even record it – he was one of the minor party candidates who collectively received 1.82% of the vote in the general election. Thankfully, the sanctity of the world’s greatest deliberative body (ahem) was preserved.

Welcome to the spin politics of the 21st century. The debate over Social Security has already devolved into a battle over whether President Bush is advocating “private accounts” or not.

Mike Allen’s story from Sunday’s Washington Post sets the scene:

As the two parties brace for the coming debate over restructuring Social Security, polls and focus groups for both sides have shown that voters — especially older ones, who vote in disproportionately heavy numbers — distrust any change that has the word “private” attached to it.

The White House has a logical idea: Don’t use the word. This is difficult because, after all, they would be “private” accounts, and Bush’s plan would “partially privatize” Social Security.

So Bush and his supporters have started using “personal accounts” instead of “private accounts” to refer to his plan to let younger workers invest part of their payroll taxes in stocks and bonds. Republican officials have begun calling journalists to complain about references to “private accounts,” even though Bush called them that three times in a speech last fall.

In fact, most conservatives talked about “privatization” and “partial privatization” until a 2002 NRCC memo (PDF) put out word that the term is politically damaging. Now they’re on to stripping the term “private accounts” out of the language for the same reason even though it was a commonly accepted term used by both sides of the debate until only a few months ago. Suddenly, private account advocates like GOP pollster Frank Luntz are claiming that the term is pejorative and reporters shouldn’t use it now that President Bush and other Republicans have stopped doing so (MP3 audio). Even the President tried to mau-mau the Washington Post during a recent interview:

The Post: Will you talk to Senate Democrats about your privatization plan?

THE PRESIDENT: You mean, the personal savings accounts?

The Post: Yes, exactly. Scott has been —

THE PRESIDENT: We don’t want to be editorializing, at least in the questions.

The Post: You used partial privatization yourself last year, sir.

THE PRESIDENT: Yes?

The Post: Yes, three times in one sentence. We had to figure this out, because we’re in an argument with the RNC [Republican National Committee] about how we should actually word this. [Post staff writer] Mike Allen, the industrious Mike Allen, found it.

THE PRESIDENT: Allen did what now?

The Post: You used partial privatization.

THE PRESIDENT: I did, personally?

The Post: Right.

THE PRESIDENT: When?

The Post: To describe it.

THE PRESIDENT: When, when was it?

The Post: Mike said it was right around the election.

THE PRESIDENT: Seriously?

The Post: It was right around the election. We’ll send it over.

THE PRESIDENT: I’m surprised. Maybe I did. It’s amazing what happens when you’re tired. Anyway, your question was? I’m sorry for interrupting.

The campaign has been immediately successful in a matter of days, with the AP, Post and Times all starting to use other terminology like “individual accounts.”

What’s even worse is that others are already suggesting that the term is not pejorative, but somehow inaccurate:

“Semantics are very important,” House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas (R-Calif.)said last week when a reporter asked about “private” accounts. “They’re personal accounts, not private accounts. No one is advocating privatizing Social Security.”

“Don’t dismiss the use of a word,” Thomas added. “The use of a word is critical in making law.”

Thomas was playing this same game back on April 20, 2002, when he was interviewed by Bob Novak on CNN’s “Evans, Novak, Hunt and Shields”:

NOVAK: Chairman Bill Thomas, we have a commission appointed by President Bush which has proposed a very ingenious approach to Social Security, with private retirement accounts. The chairman of the Republican Campaign Committee, Tom Davis, doesn’t want to see that on the floor. We had the majority leader Dick Armey here, says he doesn’t want to see it on the floor. But you — are you saying that it’s possible that you might force the Republicans to vote on that this year?

THOMAS: Well, I wouldn’t force the Republicans to vote on anything. First of all, no one’s talking about privatizing or private accounts. We are talking about personal accounts. That is, you would still have all the securities that the current Social Security system has…

NOVAK: But they might vote on it?

THOMAS: … but that they would be directed toward individuals.

It’s one thing to not like the term, but for Thomas to say that the accounts in question are not “private accounts” is basically Orwellian.

As Republicans tie themselves up in knots coming up with approved euphemisms for the accounts, we get nonsense like this statement from House Speaker Denny Hastert, which was part of a National Republican Congressional Committee fundraising letter I received in the mail today (881K PDF – see page 2):

The President has endorsed establishing partial personal control of retirement accounts that would preserve Social Security for today’s seniors while allowing younger workers to build wealth by investing part of their Social Security taxes in private investments. Do you support this bold proposal?

So we only get “partial personal control”? Aren’t the accounts supposed to be “under the individual worker’s ownership and control”? And the language appears to suggest that workers have money waiting for them in a Social Security account, which contradicts the conservative talking point that there are no such accounts. Obviously we know what Hastert means, but the NRCC direct mail firm appears to have been so paranoid about avoiding “privatization” and “private accounts” that the sentence turned into a disaster.

Unfortunately, this is where the whole debate over Social Security is going. The more that elites debate semantics rather than the substance of the issue (which almost no one understands), the less they and the public learn. And when PR professionals and politicians twist language, things get even worse. It’s a lose-lose all around — and a sad microcosm of the political debate as a whole.

Rhetoric versus fiscal reality once again – from the Washington Post:

A senior administration official told reporters that Bush’s budget — to be announced Feb. 7 — will show the government on track to cut the deficit in half from the White House’s initial deficit projection for 2004.

But the CBO projections cast significant doubt on that claim. In total, the CBO projected that the government will amass an additional $855 billion in debt between 2006 and 2015, but Holtz-Eakin cautioned that the figure almost certainly understates the problem. The total assumes no additional money will be spent in Iraq or Afghanistan over the next decade. Perhaps more important, the CBO, by law, must assume Bush’s first-term tax cuts will expire after 2010, sending the government’s balance sheet from a $189 billion deficit that year to a $71 billion surplus in 2012.

The CBO forecast also excludes the cost of Bush’s promised restructuring of Social Security, which could add an additional $1 trillion to $2 trillion over the next decade.

Even with those favorable omissions, the CBO projected that Bush will miss his goal of cutting the deficit in half by 2009 from last year’s level. The 2009 deficit, excluding war and Social Security costs, is expected to drop to $207 billion, just over half of last year’s record $412 billion level, the forecast said.

So with no spending on Iraq, Afghanistan or Social Security (as well as no fix of the alternative minimum tax, I assume), the deficit still isn’t cut in half by 2009. But we’re on track!

PS There’s a great graph in the New York Times print version today illustrating how much different our long-term fiscal trajectory looks in the CBO numbers when you add in costs for Iraq, Afghanistan and making the tax cuts permanent. But it’s not online for some reason. I’ll try to scan it in later.

Update 1/26: It’s online! (Kevin Drum has it up.) Here’s the graphic:

By contrast, here’s what the Wall Street Journal is feeding its readers (subscription required – via Paul Krugman on Josh Marshall’s site):

As Krugman points out, the Journal fails to disclose that its chart is based on two implausible assumptions that CBO is required to make — first, that Bush’s tax cuts expire in 2010 and second, that nothing is done to reform the alternative minimum tax (though the editors acknowledge that the chart also excludes costs for Iraq and Afghanistan). If the tax cuts are made permanent and the AMT is fixed, things get a whole lot worse, as in the previous graph. Don’t trust the Journal op-ed page!

This is almost beyond belief (link via Atrios):

Times insiders say [former columnist William] Safire turned down Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr.’s offer to succeed Daniel Okrent as the newspaper’s ombudsman.

Whatever you think about Safire or the Times, this is insane. He is (was) an opinion writer with a highly checkered past as both a Nixon apparatchik and a journalist. That’s not a confidence-inspiring watchdog who will improve the newspaper; it’s a blatant attempt to appease conservative critics of the Times. Thank goodness Safire said no. But what does this mean about Okrent’s successor? Is Sulzberger now courting Robert Novak? Brent Bozell?

Tom McMahon, the executive director of Howard Dean’s Democracy for America group, sent out this bizarre email to supporters yesterday (53K PDF):

Listen to this one: “Dean had the oranges,” said one of the other candidates for DNC Chair recently, “but he couldn’t make orange juice.”

It might take a second to figure out, but he was talking about you.

As the race for DNC Chair heats up, the attacks on Howard Dean have been relentless, even bizarre. But Governor Dean usually isn’t the target of the attacks — you are. And, unfortunately, those attacks have been more serious than the one about oranges.

They say that you don’t really matter. That you have made no difference.

The candidate he was referring to is Donnie Fowler, who actually said this:

“The question about Dean is: While he will have a third of the vote easily, can he get to 50 percent?” said Donnie Fowler, one of Dean’s opponents. Then Fowler referred to Dean’s presidential campaign.

“Dean had the oranges,” Fowler said, “but he couldn’t make orange juice.

Contrary to McMahon’s implication, Fowler was not demeaning Dean’s supporters. He was using a metaphor to make the obvious — and correct — point that Dean couldn’t win the Democratic nomination despite having the most grassroots support and the most money going into the Iowa caucus. Ripping the quote out of context is a cheap trick.

My post on The Note’s criticism of Paul Krugman has generated a couple of responses that I should address — one from Ken Waight of Lying in Ponds and one from obsessive Krugman critic Don Luskin.

First, let me deal with Waight. He’s a good guy who was always extremely supportive of Spinsanity (including this post last week), and I admire his site. Here’s his response to my post, which was clearly written in good faith:

I believe that [Nyhan] falls victim here to a very common misconception of Paul Krugman’s work. Because Mr. Krugman is an award-winning economist, had shown some willingness to criticize Democrats in the 1990’s, and because he doesn’t generate the dripping vitriol of Ann Coulter or the lengthy record of deception of Robert Scheer, his writing is erroneously assumed to be free of “partisan hackery”.

The only way to discover that his more recent writing has been precisely anti-Republican rather than anti-Bush, and that he has carefully failed to find fault with all Democrats rather than with liberals, is to carefully analyze the entire record of 450+ New York Times columns, and I’m the only person who’s been curious enough, or perhaps weird enough, to do that. As I’ve described in excruciating detail, each of the alternative theories which have been offered for Mr. Krugman’s one-sided punditry fail when tested against the data. He doesn’t simply criticize those in power — he wrote over 100 columns during the Clinton administration with almost no Democratic criticism, omitting any mention of the Marc Rich pardon, for example. He doesn’t merely dislike the Bush administration — his 30-1 ratio of negative to positive Republican references this year does not include more gentle treatment of moderates like John McCain (compare Thomas Oliphant or E.J. Dionne). He doesn’t simply write about economic issues — even columns about elections in France have been used to bash Republicans. His columns break down more perfectly along partisan lines than any other Democratic columnist I’ve examined, including Robert Scheer, Molly Ivins and Joe Conason — no small feat. Paul Krugman’s five years of NYT columns have been exceptionally partisan; it’s just not a close call.

Ken and I don’t actually disagree; we’re talking about two different things. My post was a critique of the way that the Note dismissed Krugman’s substantive concerns and ridiculed him for being predictable. The point was (1) that Krugman often has something substantively important to contribute in his columns and (2) that his writing is often “dismissed as partisan hackery even when it’s not” because he is seen as predictable and not counter-intuitive. I never said he doesn’t frequently criticize conservatives/Republicans; in fact, I specifically said
Krugman is “consistently anti-Bush.” Nor did I say his writing is never partisan hackery; sometimes it is.

Ken’s point is that Krugman’s writing is by definition partisan because he writes so many negative things about Republicans. But again, we’re not disagreeing — we just have different definitions of the word “partisan.” According to Waight, a writer is partisan if he consistenly offers negative portrayals of one side of the political debate, and positive or non-existent references to the other side.

My definition is different. As I wrote, “there’s nothing wrong in principle with being a forceful and consistent advocate for your views.” I don’t object in principle to polemicists who make good arguments and refrain from outlandish spin. Krugman often has something useful to contribute to the debate. I’m not concerned about how much he balances his writing with positive references to Republicans or negative references to Democrats. The key distinction for me is between, say, Krugman, and the other members of Waight’s top 3, Ann Coulter and Robert Scheer, who are ridiculous partisan hacks. There’s a crucial difference.

Now for Luskin’s silly attack on me, which is titled “Why I hate pretentious leftist twerps.” There are so many problems with it that it’s hard to know where to begin, but let’s start with this response to my statement that “elite journalism prizes being unpredictable above all else”:

Apparently for Brendan Nyhan, elite journalism is anything he disagrees with. Because as Waight proves beyond the shadow of a scintilla of a doubt in a rigorous and amusing response to Nyhan, Paul Krugman is Pauly One-Note — and with a vengeance. So to Nyhan, I suppose Waight must be a member of elite journalism, too.

This is a classic logical fallacy that Luskin just attributes to me. It’s nonsensical.

Then he utterly misconstrues my criticism of Slate, which I ridiculed for its obsesssion with being counter-intuitive, by writing, “Don’t be fooled by Nyhan’s groveling brown-nosing of Slate (hoping for a gig, no doubt — I mean, has Slate ever taken an unpredictable opinion on any issue, ever?).” This is followed by a series of ad hominems:

The elitist here is Nyhan himself — someone who hasn’t earned the slightest shred of eminence, and yet condescends to share how “sad” he is, how full of “pity” — as if anyone other than his mother cares — about the press’s “level of understanding of Social Security.”

Luskin subsequently makes up more claims about me with no supporting evidence:

Where does Nyhan get his understanding [about Social Security]? Why, from Paul Krugman, of course — “one of the top economists alive.” Maybe so — and maybe Noam Chomsky is “one of the top semanticists alive,” but I wouldn’t trust Chomsky’s whacko interpretation of the semantics of media manipulation any more than I’d trust Krugman’s partisan interpretation of Social Security. Check out that “nice primer” that Nyhan probably hasn’t even read. Sure, it looks on the surface like its published in a respectable peer-reviewed economics journal — it uses the same kind of typeface and page layout as real journals — but does Nyhan realize that The Economists’ Voice is actually a political rag run by three ultra-liberal economists including Krugman crony Brad DeLong? Does Nyhan think it’s appropriate for this “primer” from “one of the top economists alive” to feature such subjective non-economic statements as:

The right has always disliked Social Security; it has always been looking for some reason to dismantle it. Now, with a window of opportunity created by the public’s rally-around-the-flag response after 9/11, the Republican
leadership is making a full-court press for privatization, using any arguments at hand.

In fact, I didn’t get my understanding of Social Security from Paul Krugman; I read the article in question (PDF); I know who edits The Economist’s Voice; and I’m aware that Krugman’s article expresses his subjective views (what an insight!). And if Luskin actually bothered to do research before attacking real scholars, he might notice that TEV has now published articles by Hoover Institution fellow Edward Lazear; former Bush economic adviser Gregory Mankiw; and conservative judge/scholar Richard Posner in addition to Hoover fellow Michael Boskin, who Luskin previously ridiculed as playing “the Stepin Fetchit role of token conservative.”

Next, Luskin dismisses my claim that “numerous reporters can’t even understand the percentage of income that would be diverted into private accounts” using another logical fallacy, attacking the source, before simply asserting that I am wrong:

And follow Nyhan’s link to support his point that “numerous reporters can’t even understand the percentage of income that would be diverted into private accounts.” You’ll be taken to the pages of Media Matters, a George Soros-funded leftist attack site. And you’ll see that all Media Matters has to say on the subject is that some reporters use the expressions “percent” and “percentage points” interchangeably — but none of their examples even begins to suggest that this semantic error either arises from or causes any misunderstanding.

I stand behind my point – reporters who can’t correctly explain how private accounts would work don’t understand the math very well. And it’s implausible that these frequent mistakes do not cause any misunderstanding among the public.

Finally, Luskin concludes with this winner: “It took me this long to write this response because, frankly, superficial wannabe twerps like Nyhan depress me and sometimes I’d just rather pretend they don’t exist.”

Sorry for spending so long on Luskin, but I can’t let this kind of idiocy pass.

PS For those wondering about his grasp on facts and figures, don’t miss this blunder on Social Security financing, which is all too typical.

Update 1/26: Waight has published a response to this post and Luskin’s.

There’s a bizarre conceit in conservative commentary that Republicans are weak-kneed wimps who are continually taken advantage of by Democrats. Given how ruthless the Congressional GOP has been since Newt Gingrich first took control of the caucus, it’s laughable, but it still persists. Here’s the Wall Street Journal repeating the trope in an editorial arguing that Republicans should unilaterally repeal the judicial filibuster (this is the so-called “nuclear option”):

One of the weakest objections offered by some Republicans is that Democrats will do the same thing in some future Senate. Well, yes, but we doubt Republicans would ever have the nerve or unity to filibuster a Democratic nominee, and Democrats have shown in their willingness to filibuster that they don’t need a GOP precedent to do whatever they want. They’ll “go nuclear” if it suits Ted Kennedy’s purposes, whether Republicans do it first or not.

Given that Democrats have filibustered around ten of Bush’s nominees, can anyone doubt that Republicans would do the same thing to a Democratic president in the future if the judicial filibuster still exists? The idea that the GOP is too weak or disorganized to pull it off is just ridiculous. In fact, the Republican caucus obstructed far more of President Clinton’s judicial nominees than the Democrats have of Bush’s, but they did it through delays at the committee level rather than filibusters.

From today’s Note: What kind of reaction could they have been expecting to the State of the Union other than the one that they got? The White House has seemed strangely tone-deaf lately…

It’s now tempting to treat the President’s inaugural address like the 1986 season of “Dallas” that was Pam Ewing’s dream — something that we all THOUGHT we experienced, but that — it turns out — didn’t really happen.

To review: the very, very meticulous, media-savvy Bush White House had the President give a huge, historic speech in which there was unambiguously only one lead/headline possible — the President was adapting a new paradigmatic extension of the Bush Doctrine that called for fundamentally remaking America’s relationships around the world based on the supreme value of supporting democratization.

For more than 24 hours, all the Gang of 500 talked about was how big a deal all this was, how unachievable, how weighted with implications for Saudi Arabia, Russia, etc, etc, etc.

Then the White House started background sessions (supplemented by a “surprise” weekend briefing room drop-by by 41) in which they said that this was “nothing new,” “long-term,” “broad goals,” etc., etc., etc.

So: the President was for democracy on Jan. 19, on Jan. 20, and today. But he didn’t really mean to suggest any new policy in his historic, ambitious inaugural address.

Dan Froomkin has more on the administration’s efforts to walk the speech back in his White House Briefing column.